Spanner is a globally distributed relational database developed by Google and has been in use internally for years to power Google Play and AdWords among others. The company on Tuesday announced that Spanner is now generally available for "so-called" mission-critical OLTP (online transaction processing) applications.
Often tagged as NewSQL platform, Spanner is employed internally within Google's infrastructure as part of the Google platform and also available as part of Google Cloud Platform.
Now, Google is offering Cloud Spanner as a fully-managed cloud database service, and promising enterprise-grade database features, including ANSI 2011 SQL support, ACID transactions, real-time availability, and uncompromising consistency.
It assures more accuracy, reliability, and performance in the form of a fully managed cloud database service.
While Microsoft had earlier introduced Azure Cosmos Database, a globally distributed database with 5 consistency choices available, Google is pitching its Cloud Platform ahead of I/O 2017 developer conference, as a possible challenger.
Google is also pushing its no-cost trial so that potential customers can "experience first-hand the value of a relational database service that offers strong consistency, mission-critical availability, and global scalability — with no infrastructure for you to deploy, scale, or manage".
The company has partnered with data integration firms Alooma, Informatica, and Xplenty to help companies with their migration processes.
