Concepts

Concepts

• Replication

  Learn about Cloud Spanner replication, including replica types and their roles in reads and writes.

• Instances

  Learn about Cloud Spanner instances and nodes, and the tradeoffs between regional and multi-region instance configurations.

• Schema and data model

  Learn all about Cloud Spanner's schema and data model.

• Schema design

  Learn how to design Cloud Spanner schemas and load data into Cloud Spanner.

• Schema updates

  Learn how to update the schema of an existing database.

• Secondary indexes

  Learn how to increase query performance by using secondary indexes.

• Data types

  Learn about Cloud Spanner's supported data types and their properties.

• Reads

  Learn how to read Cloud Spanner data outside the context of read-only and read-write transactions.

• Transactions

  Learn about read-write and read-only transactions.

• Partitioned DML

  Learn about executing large-scale data updates without running into transaction limits.

• DML best practices

  Best practices for writing and executing DML statements.

• Timestamp bounds

  Read about timestamp bounds, which tell Cloud Spanner how to choose a timestamp at which to read data.

• Commit timestamps

  Learn how to automatically write the commit timestamp of a transaction into a column.

• Foreign keys

  Learn about foreign keys and when to use them.

• TrueTime and external consistency

  Read about TrueTime's benefits for Cloud Spanner and Cloud Spanner's external consistency property.

• Access control (IAM)

  Read about the permissions and roles that you can set at the project, Cloud Spanner instance, and Cloud Spanner database levels.

• Audit logging information

  Learn about the audit logs that Cloud Spanner writes as a part of Cloud Logging, including Admin Activity and Data Access logs.

Performance tuning

• SQL best practices

  Learn best practices for optimizing SQL query performance in Cloud Spanner.

• Query optimizer

  Overview of Cloud Spanner's query optimizer.

• Query execution plans

  Understand Cloud Spanner query execution plans.

• Efficient data loading

  Learn how to efficiently load data into Cloud Spanner.

• CPU utilization metrics

  Understand the CPU utilization metrics available in the Cloud Console and Cloud Monitoring.

• Latency metrics

  Understand the latency metrics available in the Cloud Console and Cloud Monitoring.

Introspection Tools

• Overview

  Learn about the introspection tools that are available to help you investigate issues with your database.

• Oldest active queries

  Which queries are currently active, and have been running longest?

• Query statistics

  Which queries are expensive, run frequently or scan a lot of data?

• Read statistics

  What reads or read shapes are causing high CPU usage?

• Transaction statistics

  What transactions are causing contention or other performance issues?

Advanced Concepts

• Sessions

  Learn about sessions. Applies to creators of Cloud Spanner client libraries and users of the Cloud Spanner REST API.