Cloud Spanner adds import/export functionality to ease data movement

We launched Cloud Spanner to general availability last year, and many of you shared in our excitement: You explored it, started proof-of-concept trials, and deployed apps. Perhaps most importantly, you gave us feedback along the way. We heard you, and we got to work. Today, we’re happy to announce we’ve launched one of your most commonly requested features: importing and exporting data.

Import/export using Avro

You asked for easier ways to move data. You’ve got it. You can now import and export data easily in the Cloud Spanner Console:

• Export any Cloud Spanner database into a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket.
  
• Import files from a GCS bucket into a new Cloud Spanner database.
  

These database exports and imports use Apache Avro files, transferred with our recently released Apache Beam-based Cloud Dataflow connector.

Adding imports and exports opens up even more possibilities for your Cloud Spanner data, including:

• Disaster recovery: Export your database at any time and store it in a GCS location of your choice as a backup, which can be imported into a new Cloud Spanner database to restore data.
  
• Testing: Export a database and then import it into Cloud Spanner as a dev/test database to use for integration tests or other experiments.
  
• Moving databases: Export a database and import it back into Cloud Spanner in a new/different instance with the console’s simple, push-button functionality.
  
• Ingest for analytics: Use database exports to ingest your operational data to other services such as BigQuery, for analytics. BigQuery can automatically ingest data in Avro format from a GCS bucket, which means it will become easier for you to run analytics on your operational data.
  

Ready to try it out? See our documentation on how to import and export data. Learn more about Cloud Spanner here, and get started with a free trial. For technical support and sales, please contact us.

We're excited to see the ways that Cloud Spanner—making application development more efficient, simplifying database administration and management, and providing the benefits of both relational and scale-out, non-relational databases—will continue to help you ship better apps, faster.