Spanner reliability guide

Last reviewed 2023-08-08 UTC

Spanner is a distributed SQL database management and storage service, with features such as global transactions and highly available horizontal scaling and transactional consistency.

Best practices

  • Spanner backup and restore - key features of Spanner Backup and Restore, comparison of Backup and Restore with Import and Export, implementation details, and how to control access to Spanner resources.
  • Regional and multi-region configurations - description of the two types of instance configurations that Spanner offers: regional configurations and multi-region configurations. The description includes the differences and trade-offs between each configuration.
  • Autoscaling Spanner - introduction to the Autoscaler tool for Spanner (Autoscaler), an open source tool that you can use as a companion tool to Cloud Spanner. This tool lets you automatically increase or reduce the number of nodes or processing units in one or more Spanner instances based on the utilization metrics of each Spanner instance.
  • About point-in-time recovery (PITR) - description of Spanner point-in-time recovery (PITR), a feature that protects against accidental deletion or writes of Spanner data. For example, an operator inadvertently writes data or an application rollout corrupts the database. With PITR, you can recover your data from a point-in-time in the past (up to a maximum of seven days) seamlessly.
  • Spanner best practices - guidance on bulk loading, using Data Manipulation Language (DML), designing schema to avoid hotspots, and SQL best practices.