Google LLC today introduced a new version of Cloud Spanner, one of its managed database services, that will enable customers to process their information faster and more cost-efficiently.

The company will roll out the update over the coming months. 

Google originally developed Cloud Spanner for internal use more than a decade ago. In 2017, the company began offering it through Google Cloud. Today, organizations use the database to store more than 12 exabytes of information, which equals about 12 billion gigabytes.

Cloud Spanner can be used to store relational data organized into rows and columns. It’s also capable of holding certain other types of information, including semistructured records. The latter data category encompasses files such as product description collections and business documents. 

One of Cloud Spanner’s main selling points is that it includes an extensive set of reliability features. The database is compliant with the ACID standard, which means it doesn’t lose information in the event of technical issues such as power outages and data write errors. Moreover, a Cloud Spanner deployment can be distributed across multiple Google Cloud facilities to mitigate the risk posed by localized malfunction. 

The update announced today focuses on improving the database’s performance. According to Google, Cloud Spanner now provides 50% higher throughput than before at the same price. Throughput is a metric that measures the amount of data that can be read and written per second by applications.

According to Google, the performance boost gives Cloud Spanner an edge over Amazon DynamoDB, a competing database service offered by Amazon Web Services Inc. The search giant says that Cloud Spanner can now provide up to twice as much read throughput per dollar than DynamoDB for many workloads. The higher the read throughput, the faster applications can retrieve information from the database on which they’re built. 

The speed boost comes two months after Google updated Cloud Spanner with another performance optimization feature. That feature, which is known as Data Boost, can be used to perform computationally demanding tasks such as running analytics queries. Google says that Data Boost makes it possible to perform such tasks without taking away processing power from the other workloads in a Cloud Spanner environment. 

As part of the update announced today, Google is also enhancing the database’s storage capacity. Today, a single Cloud Spanner instance can hold up to 4 terabytes of data. Google plans to up that limit to 10 terabytes.

“Even with the increased capacity, Spanner users still only pay for the storage they actually use,” Google Cloud executives Jagdeep Singh and Pritam Shah wrote in a blog post.

The throughput increase the search giant introduced for Cloud Spanner today is available immediately in select cloud regions. The enhancement will roll out more broadly in the coming months, while the new 10-terabyte storage limit is set to be implemented during the same time frame. Google said that customers won’t have to change their existing Cloud Spanner environments or temporarily take them offline to access the upgrades. 

Image: Google