Quotas & limits

This page describes production quotas and limits for Spanner. Quota and limit might be used interchangeably in the Google Cloud console.

The quota and limit values are subject to change.

Note: Storage and network usage are calculated in binary gigabytes (GB), where 1 GB is 2³⁰ bytes. This unit of measurement is also known as a gibibyte (GiB). Similarly, 1 TB is 2⁴⁰ bytes, or 1,024 GB.

Permissions to check and edit quotas

To view your quotas, you must have the serviceusage.quotas.get Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission.

To change your quotas, you must have the serviceusage.quotas.update IAM permission. This permission is included by default for the following predefined roles: Owner, Editor, and Quota Administrator.

These permissions are included by default in the basic IAM roles Owner and Editor, and in the predefined Quota Administrator role.

Check your quotas

To check the current quotas for resources in your project, use the Google Cloud console:

Go to Quotas

Increase your quotas

Note: You can apply to increase your node limits. All other limits are hard limits and cannot be adjusted.

As your use of Spanner expands over time, your quotas can increase accordingly. If you expect a notable upcoming increase in usage, you should make your request a few days in advance to ensure that your quotas are adequately sized.

You might also need to increase your consumer quota override. For more information, see Creating a consumer quota override.

You can increase your current Spanner instance configuration node limit by using the Google Cloud console.

1. Go to the Quotas page.

   Go to the Quotas page

2. Select Spanner API in the Service drop-down list.

   If you don't see Spanner API, the Spanner API has not been enabled. For more information, see Enabling APIs.

3. Select the quotas that you want to change.

4. Click Edit Quotas.

5. In the Quota changes panel that appears, enter your new quota limit.

   

6. Click Done, then Submit request.

   If you're unable to increase your node limit to your desired limit manually, click apply for higher quota. Fill out the form to submit a request to the Spanner team. You will receive a response within 48 hours of your request.

Increase your quota for a custom instance configuration

You can increase the node quota for your custom instance configuration.

1. Check the node limit of a custom instance configuration by checking the node limit of the base instance configuration.

   Use the show instance configurations detail command if you don't know or remember the base configuration of your custom instance configuration.

2. If the node limit required for your custom instance configuration is less than 85, follow the instructions in the previous Increase your quotas section. Use the Google Cloud console to increase the node limit of the base instance configuration associated with your custom instance configuration.

   If the node limit required for your custom instance configuration is more than 85, fill out the Request a Quota Increase for your Spanner Nodes form. Specify the ID of your custom instance configuration in the form.

Node limits

Value	Limit
Nodes per instance configuration	Default limits vary by project and instance configuration. To change project quota limits or request a limit increase, see Increase your quotas.

Instance limits

Value	Limit
Instance ID length	2 to 64 characters

Free trial instance limits

A Spanner free trial instance has the following additional limits. To raise or remove these limits, upgrade your free trial instance to a paid instance.

Value	Limit
Storage capacity	10 GB
Database limit	Create up to five databases
Unsupported features	Backup and restore
SLA	No SLA guarantees
Trial duration	90-day free trial period

Instance configuration limits

Value	Limit
Maximum custom instance configurations per project	100
Custom instance configuration ID length	8 to 64 characters A custom instance configuration ID must start with custom-

Geo-partitioning limits

Preview — Geo-partitioning

This feature is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" in the General Service Terms section of the Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA features are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

Value	Limit
Maximum number of partitions per instance	10
Maximum number of placement rows per node in your partition	100 million

Database limits

• For instances of 1 node (1000 processing units) and larger: 4 TB per node
• For instances smaller than 1 node: 409.6 GB per 100 processing units

Increased storage capacity of 10 TB per node is available in most regional, dual-region, and multi-region Spanner instance configurations. For more information, see Performance and storage improvements.

Backups are stored separately and don't count towards this limit. For more information, see Storage utilization metrics.

Note that Spanner bills for actual storage utilized within an instance, and not its total available storage.

Value	Limit
Databases per instance	For instances of 1 node (1000 processing units) and larger: 100 databases For instances smaller than 1 node: 10 databases per 100 processing units
Roles per database	100
Database ID length	2 to 30 characters
Storage size^1

Backup and restore limits

Value	Limit
Number of ongoing create backup operations per database	1
Number of ongoing restore database operations per instance (in the instance of the restored database, not the backup)	10
Maximum retention time of backup	1 year (including the extra day in a leap year)

Schema limits

DDL statements

Value	Limit
DDL statement size for a single schema change	10 MB
DDL statement size for a database's entire schema, as returned by GetDatabaseDdl	10 MB

Tables

Value	Limit
Tables per database	5,000
Table name length	1 to 128 characters
Columns per table	1,024
Column name length	1 to 128 characters
Size of data per cell	10 MiB
Size of a STRING cell	2,621,440 Unicode characters
Number of columns in a table key	16 Includes key columns shared with any parent table
Table interleaving depth	7 A top-level table with child table(s) has depth 1. A top-level table with grandchild table(s) has depth 2, and so on.
Total size of a table or index key	8 KB Includes the size of all columns that make up the key
Total size of non-key columns	1600 MB Includes the size of all non-key columns for a table

Indexes

Value	Limit
Indexes per database	10,000
Indexes per table	128
Index name length	1 to 128 characters
Number of columns in an index key	16 The number of indexed columns (except for STORING columns) plus the number of primary key columns in the base table

Views

Value	Limit
Views per database	5,000
View name length	1 to 128 characters
Nesting depth	10 A view that refers to another view has nesting depth 1. A view that refers to another view that refers to yet another view has nesting depth 2, and so on.

Query limits

Value	Limit
Columns in a GROUP BY clause	1,000
Values in an IN operator	10,000
Function calls	1,000
Joins	20
Nested function calls	75
Nested GROUP BY clauses	35
Nested subquery expressions	25
Nested subselect statements	60
Parameters	950
Query statement length	1 million characters
STRUCT fields	1,000
Subquery expression children	50
Unions in a query	200

Limits for creating, reading, updating, and deleting data

Value	Limit
Commit size (including indexes and change streams)	100 MB
Concurrent reads per session	100
Mutations per commit (including indexes)^2	80,000
Concurrent Partitioned DML statements per database	20,000

Administrative limits

Value	Limit
Administrative actions request size^3	1 MB
Rate limit for administrative actions^4	5 per second per project per user (averaged over 100 seconds)

Request limits

Value	Limit
Request size other than for commits^5	10 MB

Change stream limits

Value	Limit
Change streams per database	10
Change streams watching any given non-key column^6	3
Concurrent readers per change stream data partition^7	5

Data Boost limits

Value	Limit
Concurrent Data Boost requests per project in us-central1	1000 ^8
Concurrent Data Boost requests per project per region in other regions	400 ^8

Notes

1. To provide high availability and low latency for accessing a database, Spanner defines storage limits based on the compute capacity of the instance:

• For instances smaller than 1 node (1000 processing units), Spanner allots 409.6 GB of data for every 100 processing units in the database.
• For instances of 1 node and larger, Spanner allots 4 TB of data for each node.

For example, to create an instance for a 600 GB database, you need to set its compute capacity to 200 processing units. This amount of compute capacity will keep the instance below the limit until the database grows to more than 819.2 GB. After the database reaches this size, you need to add another 100 processing units to allow the database to grow. Otherwise, writes to the database may be rejected. For more information, see Recommendations for database storage utilization.

For a smooth growth experience, add compute capacity before the limit is reached for your database.

2. Insert and update operations count with the multiplicity of the number of columns they affect, and primary key columns are always affected. For example, inserting a new record may count as five mutations, if values are inserted into five columns. Updating three columns in a record may also count as five mutations if the record has two primary key columns. Delete and delete range operations count as one mutation regardless of the number of columns affected. Deleting a row from a parent table that has the ON DELETE CASCADE annotation is also counted as one mutation regardless of the number of interleaved child rows present. The exception to this is if there are secondary indexes defined on rows being deleted, then the changes to the secondary indexes will be counted individually. For example, if a table has 2 secondary indexes, deleting a range of rows in the table will count as 1 mutation for the table, plus 2 mutations for each row that is deleted because the rows in the secondary index might be scattered over the key-space, making it impossible for Spanner to call a single delete range operation on the secondary indexes. Secondary indexes include the foreign keys backing indexes.

To find the mutation count for a transaction, see Retrieving commit statistics for a transaction.

Change streams don't add any mutations that count towards this limit.

3. The limit for an administrative action request excludes commits, requests listed in note 5, and schema changes.

4. This rate limit includes all calls to the admin API, which includes calls to poll long-running operations on an instance, database, or backup.

5. This limit includes requests for creating a database, updating a database, reading, streaming reads, executing SQL queries, and executing streaming SQL queries.

6. A change stream that watches an entire table or database implicitly watches every column in that table or database, and therefore counts towards this limit.

7. This limit applies to concurrent readers of the same change streams partition, whether the readers are Dataflow pipelines or direct API queries.

8. Default limits vary by project and regions. For more information, see Monitor and manage Data Boost quota usage.