Cloud Spanner (available now in beta) is a distributed relational database able to scale to hundreds of data centers and millions of mac...
Cloud Spanner (available now in beta) is a distributed relational database able to scale to hundreds of data centers and millions of machines, however, acting as if it were a single database. Spanner can simultaneously handle a large number of global transactions without the need to replicate data in different data centers, operations that in addition prove costly can slow the execution of certain tasks (data logging, data access by applications etc.). Not surprisingly, the company uses it to support its main source of income, AdWords, in addition to Google Play Store - boundless archive of app well known to all Android device owners.
For analysts and industry experts, the Mountain View move is quite clear: the intention is to raise the stakes in a strategic sector of the market (applications are supported, moreover, the database) and subtract enterprise customers valuable historically known competitor for their database solutions such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
And being quite complex to move data from one database solution, which is why Oracle continues to dominate the sector undisturbed, potential new customers would long remain "under the" Google flag. Similarly different customers may well opt for the "no change": play around with the transaction systems is a task far from simple and that does not bring tangible increases in sales.
Genesis of the database and use cases
Spanner on paper is presented as the single largest database in the world. The development was started when Google engineers realized that MySQL was beginning to be more adequate to the company's needs. And Bigtable? The latter also turned out a road impractical because it could not guarantee the logical properties of transactions (ACID) globally. The coaching staff then started the sharding manual procedures to a database that had reached considerable dimensions - talking about tens of terabytes. A detailed report is available at the following link (pdf).
But who the audience is exactly Cloud Spanner? In general, note the experts, is the same network to demand the use of distributed databases like Spanner: in sectors such as ecommerce or online gaming, in which the user expects to lightning-fast response times, service it can in fact ensure adequate performance. Mountain View comes Spanner as a service designed for database consolidation or NoSQL applications needing a more robust transactional consistency.
