The world’s unpredictable, your databases shouldn’t add to it

The ability for your business to tackle the unpredictable has only become more critical for success—whether it’s contending with quick shifts in supply chains, running entirely through online channels, or handling unexpected surges in customer demand. At the core of being able to support this are the databases backing your business and powering applications. And that’s why Google Cloud has designed our databases with the same innovation necessary to handle the unpredictability of Google’s own business. This means building databases that are simple to use and manage; provide security and portability for your data; and are proven for even the most transformative applications.   

This week at Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir, we’ll dive into our entire portfolio of databases and showcase new advancements that continue to push the envelope. There are sessions to explore for wherever you are in your journey—from moving to the cloud to modernizing legacy systems and building new applications—along with great customer stories to hear how other companies are redefining what it means to be a modern business with Google Cloud.

One of those customers is ShareChat, one of India’s largest social media platforms. They recently completed their migration from Amazon DynamoDB to Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable to better meet their needs for scale and cost efficiencies. While they’ve already realized 30% lower costs from the migration, the true value came when they experienced an unexpected 500% spike in traffic over just a few days and were able to scale horizontally, with zero lines of code change, to meet the increased demand. Check out this week’s keynote for the details. 

What’s new across Google Cloud databases
Across our database portfolio, we continue to deliver new innovations to solve the hardest data problems and run the most mission-critical applications. Here’s a look at what’s new.

Spanner: Better for developers, better for data reliability
Spanner leads the relational world in delivering the unique pairing of a relational database with non-relational scale and industry-leading five 9s availability. The Spanner Emulator, now generally available, lets application developers do correctness testing when developing an application. The emulator runs in an offline environment, thereby improving productivity and reducing costs. Spanner also provides a new C++ client library, additional introspection capabilities, an open-source JDBC driver and Hibernate ORM integration. Plus, you’ll find an increased SQL feature set with foreign keys, query optimizer versioning, and WITH clause support.

In addition, cloud-native Spanner now offers new multi-region configurations for Asia and Europe with 99.999% availability, and user-managed backup and restore that lets you create backups of Spanner databases on demand.

Bigtable: Trusted for enterprise workloads, big and small
Bigtable, our NoSQL database service, now offers expanded capabilities such as managed backups to help customers achieve high business continuity and add data protection to their most mission-critical workloads with minimal management overhead. We’ve added table-level identity access management (IAM) and audit logs for admin activity. We’ve also expanded support and SLA for single-node production instances to make it even easier to use Bigtable for all of your key-value and wide-column use-cases, both large and small.

Cloud Firestore: Better visibility and even easier app development
Firestore, which lets mobile and web developers build apps easily, now offers a richer query language, C++ client library, and Firestore Unity SDK to make it easy for game developers to adopt Firestore. We are also introducing tools to give you better visibility into usage patterns and performance with Firestore Key Visualizer, which will be coming soon. Firestore remains popular, especially among developers looking to build reliable, real-time applications at scale. Since Firestore became generally available just over 18 months ago, more than 2 million databases have been created, powering mobile, web, and IoT applications. And a recent study from SlashData found that Firestore had the most satisfied developers compared to any other cloud database on the market. 

Cloud SQL: Enterprise controls for availability, security, financial governance
Cloud SQL is the fully managed service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. We’ve continued to improve the enterprise capabilities of Cloud SQL, including adding more maintenance controls and cross-region replication to make it easy to maintain business continuity in case of failure, and point-in-time-recovery for Postgres to easily restore from past states. Additionally, committed use discounts give you flexibility and financial controls, without the manual overhead. These are transferable across SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, and machine sizes, so you can maximize your utilization even as your resourcing needs change, and can result in a 25% discount from on-demand pricing for a one-year commitment and a 52% discount from on-demand pricing for a three-year commitment. 

Not only has Cloud SQL continued to grow in popularity across enterprises, but its native integrations across Google Cloud have resulted in some truly powerful architectures. We’ve seen Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) users deploying more than 500,000 proxy instances to securely connect to Cloud SQL. And BigQuery users have been able to query 22 PB of data in Cloud SQL in a month, using federated queries to bridge the gap between analytics and operational data.

Bare Metal Solution: The cloud fast track for specialized workloads
For users who may have licensing restrictions or are looking to migrate legacy on-prem databases as-is to the cloud, the Bare Metal Solution is a great option to move workloads quickly and lower overall costs. 

For those of you running specialized workloads, like Oracle, that require certified hardware and configuration, our Bare Metal Solution is now available in even more regions. Bare Metal Solution helps you move these workloads within milliseconds of latency to Google Cloud, providing a fast path to modernize your application infrastructure landscape while maintaining your existing investments and architecture. 

How customers are using data management tools
Along with hearing from ShareChat in our keynote, check out their session on switching from DynamoDB to Bigtable and Spanner to learn how the company migrated from AWS to Google Cloud for better scale, and improved efficiency. And see how the New York Times built a real-time collaborative editor with Firestore so writers and editors can see each others’ edits as they happen and push to publication fast. 

You can also hear about how gaming publishers have scaled quickly with Spanner, including game publisher Colopl. And join Firestore product experts along with the CTO and VP of engineering at Khan Academy to learn about new Firestore capabilities and how Khan Academy was able to meet the increasing demand for online learning. 

There’s plenty of unpredictability in the world today—your databases don’t need to add to it. We’re looking forward to seeing you digitally this week to explore, learn, and connect. 

Want to get your hands on what’s new? Start with a free Google Cloud trial. And check out why Google Cloud was ranked a leader for databases by Gartner.