Introducing Google’s latest addition to the toolbox – Cloud Spanner

Google recently announced the launch of Cloud Spanner, a globally distributed relational database service that the corporation says will enable customers to have their cake and eat it too.

When building cloud applications, database administrators and developers have been forced to choose between traditional databases that guarantee transactional consistency, or NoSQL databases that offer simple, horizontal scaling and data distribution. Cloud Spanner breaks that dichotomy, offering both of these critical capabilities in a single, fully managed service.

JDA, a retail and supply chain software leader, has used Google Cloud Platform as the basis of its new application and delivery since 2015 and was an early user of Cloud Spanner.

JDA group vice president of technology, John Sarvari says the company saw its potential to handle the explosion of data coming from new information sources such as Internet of Things.

"Cloud Spanner presents tremendous value for our customers who are retailers, manufacturers and wholesale distributors around the world," says Sarvari.

"With its ease of provisioning and scalability, it will accelerate our ability to bring cloud-based omni-channel supply chain solutions to our users around the world.

Google affirms there are a number of key benefits of Cloud Spanner as a managed service, including:

• Focus on your application logic instead of spending valuable time managing hardware and software
• Scale out your RDBMS solutions without complex sharding or clustering
• Gain horizontal scaling without migration from relational to NoSQL databases
• Maintain high availability and protect against disaster without needing to engineer a complex replication and failover infrastructure
• Gain integrated security with data-layer encryption, identity and access management and audit logging

Google have tested Cloud Spanner internally for years with hundreds of different applications and petabytes of data across data centers around the world. Within the company, Cloud Spanner supports tens of millions of queries per second while running some of their most critical services, including AdWords and Google Play.

Product manager for Cloud Spanner, Deepti Srivastava says for decades, developers have relied on traditional databases with a relational data model and SQL semantics to build applications that meet business needs.

"Cloud Spanner keeps application development simple by supporting standard tools and languages in a familiar relational database environment," Srivastava says.

"It's ideal for operational workloads supported by traditional relational databases, including inventory management, financial transactions and control systems, that are outgrowing those systems. It supports distributed transactions, schemas and DDL statements, SQL queries and JDBC drivers and offers client libraries for the most popular languages, including Java, Go, Python and Node.js.