Mark Mirchandani and Stephanie Wong are back this week as we learn about all the new things happening with Google Cloud Spanner. Our guests this week, Dilraj Kaur and Christoph Bussler, describe Cloud Spanner as a fully managed relational database that boasts unlimited scaling and advanced consistency and availability.

Unlimited scaling truly means unlimited, and Chris explains why Cloud Spanner offers this feature and how it’s making database design and development easier. Dilraj and Chris tell us all about the cool new features Spanner has developed, like generated columns and foreign keys, and how customer needs influenced these developments. Chris walks us through the process of using some of these new features, including how developers can monitor their database systems.

Managed backups and multi-region configuration are additional recent additions to Cloud Spanner, and our guests explain how these are used by current enterprise clients. Dilraj and Chris explain the automatically managed features of Spanner versus the customer managed features and how people set up and manage database projects. We hear examples of companies using Cloud Spanner and how it has improved their businesses.

Dilraj Kaur

Dilraj Kaur is an Enterprise Customer Engineer with specialization in Data Management. She has been with Google for about 2.5 years and is based in Atlanta.

Christoph Bussler

As a Solutions Architect Chris is focusing on databases, data migration and data integration in enterprise customer settings. See his professional work and background on his website.

Cool things of the week

• New to Google Cloud? Here are a few free trainings to help you get started blog
  • Start your skills challenge today site
• Service Directory is generally available: Simplify your service inventory blog

Interview

• Google Cloud Spanner site
• GCP Podcast Episode 62: Cloud Spanner with Deepti Srivastava podcast
• Using the Cloud Spanner Emulator docs
• Cloud Spanner Ecosystem site
• Cloud Spanner Qwiklabs site
• Google Cloud Platform Community On Slack site
• Creating and managing generated columns docs
• WITH Clause docs
• Foreign Keys docs
• Numeric Data Type docs
• Information schema docs
• Overview of introspection tools docs
• Backup and Restore docs
• Multi-region configurations docs
• ShareChat: Building a scalable data-driven social network for non-English speakers globally site
• Blockchain.com: Streamlining infrastructure for the world’s most dynamic financial market site
• What is Cloud Spanner? video

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Mark has been working on budgeting blog posts, including Protect your Google Cloud spending with budgets.

Stephanie is working on her data center animation series