Cloud Spanner adds enhanced query introspection, new regions, and new multi-region configurations

As the year comes to a close, we’re pleased to share a few enhancements for Cloud Spanner that we’ve recently added to the product, based on customer requests:

• Query introspection improvements
  
• New region availability
  
• New multi-region configurations
  

Here’s a closer look at each of these updates.

Query introspection improvements

Cloud Spanner is our scalable, relational database service. One of our guiding principles when adding features is that we want our customers to have a familiar user experience compared to traditional relational databases.

With that in mind, we’re excited to announce the addition of the query statistics feature, which provides the capability to view, inspect, and debug the most common and most resource- consuming Cloud Spanner SQL queries that are executed on a database. This is similar to what you might be familiar with from other RDBMS for inspecting common queries, such as pg_stat_statements in PostgreSQL and Performance Schema in MySQL.

This new Cloud Spanner introspection capability gives users better visibility into frequent and expensive queries running on the system. This information is useful both during schema and query design, as well as for production debugging—users can see which queries need to be optimized to improve performance and resource consumption. Optimizing queries that use significant amounts of database resources is a way to reduce operational costs and improve general system latencies.

For more information on how this works and to get started, read more here.

New regional availability

When building critical business applications, it’s important to have the option to host your database in the same region as your application stack, and close to your customers for better performance. To help meet that goal, we recently announced the availability of Cloud Spanner in Hong Kong as part of the GCP region launch. Additionally, we have added Cloud Spanner availability to seven other GCP regions this year, bringing the total region availability to 14 (out of 18) GCP regions. New regions added this year are South Carolina, Singapore, Netherlands, Montreal, Mumbai, Northern Virginia, and Los Angeles. You can see all Cloud Spanner regions here:

Our plan is for Cloud Spanner to be available in all new GCP regions moving forward.

New multi-region configurations

Cloud Spanner is the only database that offers strong transactional consistency of data in multi-region and global configurations, which provides a simpler development model, improved availability, and reduced read latency. Based on your requests, we are pleased to announce two new multi-region configurations for Cloud Spanner.

The first new configuration (nam6) provides multi-region coverage within the United States to reduce latency across the coasts and the middle of the country and provide enhanced durability in the event of a regional outage. You can see the nam6 configuration here:

The second new configuration (eur3) provides multi-region coverage within the European Union. This increases availability and performance for applications based in the EU that serve a predominantly EU customer base. You can see the eur3 configuration here:

Learn more about Cloud Spanner pricing and see how to create these instance configurations here.

To get started with all the new regions and configurations, just spin up an instance in the Google Cloud console. To catch up on product announcements, customer stories, and videos about Cloud Spanner, check out our new updates page.