Google LLC is updating two of its most popular managed cloud databases as part of a continuing effort to reduce the operational complexity of using the services.

The updates, announced at the company’s Cloud Next conference in London Thursday, affect the Google Cloud Spanner and Google Cloud BigTable database services.

Cloud Spanner is Google’s managed relational database offering, used to power enterprise, gaming and software-as-a-service computer applications. Today’s update adds more functionality for users who need to query Cloud Spanner using the SQL data manipulation language, which is the standard way to manipulate data stored within it.

The addition of INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE SQL statements is supposed to make it easier read and write data to Cloud Spanner, Google product managers Deepti Srivastava and Misha Brukman wrote in a blog post. The database has also been updated with a new version of the JDBC driver.

“This update makes it easier to reuse existing code and tool chains, so you can integrate with popular object-relational mappers,” Srivastava and Brukman wrote. “This reduces the learning curve for new Cloud Spanner users and makes porting existing applications easier.”

As for Cloud BigTable, this is Google’s fully managed NoSQL key value and wide-column database service that’s best suited for time-series, graph and “internet of things” workloads as it offers higher throughput and lower latency than traditional databases.

With the update, BigTable gains a new Key Visualizer feature that Srivastava and Brukman said will provide greater visibility into application behavior. They explained that developers requested the feature so they can better enable schema and performance optimization with BigTable.

The Key Visualizer feature works by debugging performance issues within BigTable, and visualizing these via a heat map that allows administrators to get to the root of any problems quickly.

“Key Visualizer has helped many teams here at Google and Google Cloud customers by providing them with insights into their database usage patterns, without impacting the serving capabilities of the database itself,” Srivastava and Brukman wrote. “This means you can design and refine your data model to best take advantage of the horizontal scalability of our GCP services.”

The updates to Cloud Spanner and Cloud BigTable came during a busy day for Google, which also found time to add new ways make data more accessible in its Cloud Storage service and extend its identity and access management services to developers and legacy applications.

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