Spanner in 2024: A year of innovation

Spanner is Google’s always-on, virtually unlimited database that powers planet-scale applications like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Photos. Outside of Google, Spanner powers demanding workloads for household brands like Yahoo!, The Home Depot, Wayfair, and Pokémon Go. Today, Spanner handles over 4 billion queries per second at peak and more than 15 exabytes of data, with five 9s of availability, plus global consistency.

Since we first discussed it in 2012, Spanner has evolved from a groundbreaking distributed SQL database into a versatile, intelligent innovation platform. 2024 was a big year for Spanner, with multiple launches that expanded its functional capabilities, pushed the envelope on price-performance, re-architected it for best-in-class reliability and security, and enhanced the developer experience. Here is a recap of Spanner’s biggest innovations of the year and how you can benefit from them.

1. Multi-model: one database, many possibilities

With the launch of Spanner Graph, full-text search and vector search, Spanner went from being a highly available, globally consistent and scalable database, to a multi-model database with intelligent, interoperable capabilities with which you can build AI-enabled applications. Unlike other multi-model databases on the market, Spanner offers a true multi-model experience that allows interoperability between different data models without downtime. 

Spanner's multi-model support lets you consolidate databases, saving on costs and reducing operational overhead, governance, and security touchpoints, while its interoperability eliminates data movement for a "true ZeroETL" experience with consistent data across all models. This helps enable use cases like near-real-time fraud detection, supply chain optimization, or product recommendations. 

2. Improving price-performance  

Spanner’s price-performance lets you dream big, start small (for as little as $65/mo), and scale linearly with no cliffs. In 2022, we increased the storage per node from 2T to 4T, and in 2023 we built on this with a 50% increase in throughput and a 2.5X increase in storage at no additional cost. 

This year, with the launch of new multi-model capabilities, we wanted to make it simple and cost effective for you to use these capabilities without charging incrementally for every new feature. The result was Spanner editions, an intuitive, tier-based pricing approach that offers different capabilities at various price points to fit you diverse needs and budgets, all while providing flexibility, cost transparency and additional cost saving opportunities.

3. A new home for your Cassandra workloads

The Cassandra NoSQL database is prized for its speed and scalability. It also has limitations, such as limited support for complex queries and difficulty modeling intricate relationships. Spanner combines the scalability and availability of NoSQL with the strong consistency and relational model of traditional databases, for the best of both worlds. 

This year, we launched the Cassandra to Spanner Proxy Adapter, an open-source, plug-and-play tool that makes it easier than ever to move your Cassandra workload to Spanner with near-zero changes to your application logic. Customers like Yahoo! and Reltio are loving the ease of use of the Cassandra proxy adapter, and we’re excited to help customers be more successful with Cassandra on Spanner. 

4. Generative AI and the Spanner ecosystem

Over the past year, we’ve witnessed a remarkable shift in how organizations leverage generative AI. But gen AI comes with risk of hallucinations. We believe that transactional and analytical databases can help reduce these, bridging the gap between foundation models and enterprise gen AI apps. Here’s how: 

• Vector support: With vector support for Spanner, developers can perform similarity searches on vector embeddings stored in the database. Spanner vector search supports both exact KNN and approximate ANN searches, providing flexibilit for different workloads that leverage Google's scalable nearest neighbor (ScaNN) algorithm, providing fast and accurate results, even on large datasets. Spanner now supports vector searches scaling to more than 10 billion vectors. Developers can combine vector searches with regular SQL and graph GQL queries to power use-cases like RAG applications. 

• BigQuery and Spanner better together: New, groundbreaking integrations between Spanner and BigQuery help businesses connect operational and analytical workloads, to unlock valuable insights and drive better decision-making. Spanner external datasets in BigQuery allows you to query transactional data residing in Spanner directly within BigQuery, without needing to move or duplicate data. Spanner now also supports reverse ETL from BigQuery to export data from BigQuery to Spanner, so you can operationalize the analytical insights that BigQuery enables. 

5. Reliability, availability, security, and governance 

Spanner customers expect the highest levels of reliability, availability, security, and governance controls for their mission-critical workloads. This year, we launched support for dual-region configurations and geo-partitioning to help you improve your availability SLAs, improve application performance for multi-region workloads, and meet governance requirements.

• Dual-region support: Spanner dual-region configurations help meet local residency requirements while providing five 9s of availability and zero recovery-point objective (RPO) guarantees in geographies with only two regions. 

• Geo-partitioning: You can partition your table data at the row-level across the globe, to serve data closer to your users. With geo-partitioning, Spanner customers across industries like gaming, e-commerce, and financial services can provide their users reduced application latency, optimized costs, and data residency benefits such as storing sensitive user data within geographic jurisdictions.

Lastly, we introduced support for incremental and scheduled backups to make it easier and cheaper to back up your Spanner data. 

6.  The developer experience

At Google Cloud, we strive to make it ridiculously simple to build and manage applications built on our databases, including Spanner. 

• Protobuf improvements: Protocol Buffers, or protobuf, is a language-neutral way to encode and decode data structures for efficient transport and storage. You can now manage protobuf values in Spanner and access their fields using the dot operator in SQL, e.g., dimensions.size.width, without having to normalize into tables upfront. This dramatically simplifies writing queries that need to filter, group, or order by specific values within a protobuf. 

• Troubleshooting and Database Center support: Database Center is an AI-powered unified database management solution to monitor and manage diverse database services. This year, customers started to be able to use Database Center to manage their Spanner databases. We also added support for end-to-end tracing and client tracing to make it easier to troubleshoot performance issues. 

We are proud of what we have delivered for customers in 2024, and are excited to see the innovative solutions you are building on Spanner. Needless to say, we are just getting started and we have a lot more exciting capabilities lined up for 2025. 

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