Unlock the potential of your data: Build reliable and intelligent applications with Spanner editions

Operational databases are the cornerstone of modern applications. As user demands evolve and application complexity grows, organizations have adopted a multitude of specialized databases to meet specific needs. However, this trend has led to challenges. Each database often brings its own unique data modeling, storage, and retrieval mechanisms, creating data silos and increasing the complexity of data pipelines — not to mention the increasingly large IT budgets to manage it all. 

Spanner is the always-on, globally consistent, and virtually unlimited-scale database, powering a wide array of modern applications across different industries. It has become the foundation for many innovative organizations in their data-driven transformations. Today, we’re introducing a new set of capabilities in Spanner across graph, full-text search, vector search and more. These innovations allow organizations to consolidate their operational deployments and build intelligent applications with seamless interoperability among different data models, all on one powerful database.

• Spanner Graph offers an intuitive and concise way to match patterns, traverse relationships, and filter results in interconnected data, to serve common graph use cases such as personalized recommendations, finding communities, or identifying fraud.

• Advanced full-text search builds on Google’s decades of search expertise to bring powerful matching and relevance ranking over unstructured text.

• Vector search supports semantic information retrieval, the bedrock of generative AI applications, building on 12+ years of Google research and innovation in approximate nearest neighbor algorithms.

In addition, we recently enhanced Spanner's core platform to meet the increasingly complex latency, cost, and compliance demands of our enterprise customers.

• Geo-partitioning allows you to deploy globally while storing parts of your data in specific locations to support fast local access.

• Dual-region configurations offer multi-regional availability properties while respecting data sovereignty requirements.

• Auto-scaling automatically adjusts the size of your Spanner deployment, allowing you to quickly react to changes in traffic patterns without the need to overprovision.

Introducing Spanner editions

With these new capabilities, we are excited to introduce Spanner editions, a new tiered pricing model that helps you take advantage of these innovations while delivering better cost transparency and cost savings opportunities. With Spanner editions, you can choose between our Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, letting you pick the right set of capabilities to fit your needs and budget.

Standard edition is a comprehensive offering that includes all of the current capabilities that are generally available (GA) in single-region configurations, along with new features like scheduled backups and reverse ETL from BigQuery. Enterprise edition builds on the Standard edition by harnessing the power of multi-model capabilities including the new Spanner Graph, advanced full-text search and vector search. It also provides enhanced operational simplicity and data protection using managed autoscaling and incremental backups. For workloads that require the highest levels of availability, performance, compliance and governance, Enterprise Plus edition includes multi-region configurations with 99.999% availability and the new geo-partitioning functionality.

Let’s take a deeper look at each of the Spanner editions. 

Standard edition

Standard edition embodies everything you love about Spanner, and then some. With Standard edition you get access to Spanner's single-region configurations, offering automatic sharding, synchronous replication, and transparent failover, ensuring virtually unlimited scale and 99.99% availability. Standard edition includes all current GA functionality, including our current enterprise-grade security and data-protection controls.

In addition, we’re enhancing the Standard edition with new capabilities. Adding on to Spanner's tight integration with BigQuery, with features like Data Boost and BigQuery federation, we are expanding our offering with new features like reverse ETL and external datasets with BigQuery. We also expanded its data protection capabilities with scheduled backups. All Spanner customers can benefit from these enhanced capabilities in Standard edition.

Here are some ways customers can benefit from Standard edition:

• Reduce operational toil, eliminate costly planned and unplanned downtime, and lower the total cost of ownership by migrating your relational workloads to Spanner.

• Avoid complex application-level sharding using Spanner's automatic sharding, e.g., sharded MySQL.

• Avoid lock-in and modernize your applications using Spanner's native PostgreSQL interface.

• Level up your NoSQL workloads with consistent secondary indexes and multirow transactions, with support for API-compatible adapters for Cassandra and DynamoDB.

• Consolidate your data into a single source-of-truth database, using BigQuery federation and Spanner Data Boost to run analytics on up-to-date data, while avoiding complex ETL pipelines and data silos.

• Serve complex analytics use-cases with high QPS and low latency by computing them in BigQuery and using reverse ETL to serve them from Spanner.

Enterprise edition

Enterprise edition gives you access to expanded data modalities, allowing you to offer truly multi-model access for your applications and consolidate your operational deployments. With Enterprise edition, you can access your data using Spanner Graph, full-text search, and vector-search functionality, in addition to Spanner’s current relational and NoSQL functionality. The best part is that all this functionality can be combined, offering a true, fully interoperable multi-model database that maintains Spanner's core benefits of high availability, scalability and consistency. With all your data in one place, you don’t need to move data between your transactional and purpose-built databases, so you can avoid data duplication and silos, reduce operational complexity, simplify data governance, and ultimately lower your total cost of ownership.

Here are some ways customers can benefit from Enterprise edition:

• Supercharge your applications with Spanner Graph capabilities at virtually unlimited scale by combining the strengths of SQL and GQL, enabling analysts and developers to query structured and connected data in a single operation.

• Modernize your search applications and simplify your operational pipelines with full-text search, using advanced search capabilities without having to copy and index data into a dedicated search solution.

• Improve AI-assisted user experience by grounding foundational model on contextual, domain-specific, and real-time data with native vector search support in your operational data. 

• Launch powerful multi-model applications, such as a searchable product catalog that combines full-text and vector search to mix traditional and semantic information retrieval, or a generative AI product that uses relational and knowledge graph RAG techniques to ground LLMs.

Enterprise Plus edition

Enterprise Plus edition is Spanner's most highly available and full-featured offering. In addition to including our 99.999% multi-region configurations, Enterprise Plus offers new dual-region configurations, allowing you to access Spanner's unmatched availability while meeting your data sovereignty requirements. Enterprise Plus also gives you access to geo-partitioning, so you can operate a truly global deployment while maintaining low-latency and data locality for subsets of your data.

Here are some ways customers can benefit from Enterprise Plus edition:

• Avoid the need to build and manage complex disaster recovery solutions by deploying applications on Spanner's multi-region configurations, giving you 99.999% availability and a true 0-RTO and 0-RPO deployment.

• Maintain data sovereignty requirements without compromising availability by accessing Spanner's dual-region configurations in locations like Australia, Germany, India and Japan.

• Manage your global deployment while maintaining data locality by partitioning your data so that it's always available where you need it, and with low latency.

Enhanced transparency and cost optimization

With new Spanner editions, we’re also introducing a simplified pricing model, moving to per-replica billing and decoupling compute and data replication costs, increasing cost-transparency and efficiency. There are several cost optimization features in each of the editions, and upgrading to a new edition is designed to be a seamless experience.

Standard edition is offered at no change in cost for single-region customers. Customers looking for expanded multi-model and search capabilities can opt for Enterprise edition with a single price point rather than having different pricing for each individual feature. They can further leverage the price-performance enhancements such as managed autoscaler and incremental backups. Enterprise Plus edition goes even further, offering reduced compute costs, decoupled replication from compute, and removes storage charges for witness replicas. Finally, customers using configurable read-only replicas will get significant cost reduction for these replicas as they will be priced the same as read-write replicas for each edition. Transitioning to Spanner editions is seamless and you can leverage all the innovations that Spanner offers, while optimizing your costs.

Spanner editions will be available starting September 24, 2024. For more information, see the Spanner editions overview page.