(Original creator: mark.stuivenberg)
I recently attended the , a one day conference covering services by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) According to Gartner, Google takes the third spot in the public cloud space with Amazon Web Services and Azure taking first and second place respectively. Amongst the plethora of GCP offerings (Technology Highlights Google Cloud Next 2017) I was interested in Cloud Spanner one of the newer PaaS offerings which could prove interesting to Uniface’s supported RDBMS list. As it is also of interest how it applies to Application Development.
Cloud Spanner is a fully managed relational database which can scale globally, Google claims that Cloud Spanner is able to scale to thousands of servers and able to handle the biggest transactional workloads. Cloud Spanner joins the ranks of CockroachDB, Clustrix, VoltDB, MemSQL, NuoDB and Trafodion where are coined ‘NewSQL’ databases. NewSQL databases are databases which still offer the traditional Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability (ACID) with the massive scalability often associated with NoSQL databases.
Being a distributed database, Cloud Spanner can distribute your data over the nodes that you have decided to use in your setup, Google calls this splitting. Data may be split by rows or by load for example if Spanner detects that there are a certain number of rows used more frequently it’s able to split these rows over multiple nodes.
Cloud Spanner offers a standard variety of SQL datatypes, BOOL, INT64, FLOAT64, String, BYTES, DATE, TIMESTAMP and ARRAYS. Various client libraries are already available and come in Java, Python, Go, NodeJS, Ruby and PHP flavours.
Cloud Spanner looks like a game changing distributed database and I’m sure that at Uniface we will be taking it for a test drive to demonstrate its capabilities. Next to all this there were also exciting news on other areas like About Google App Maker.