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Cloud Spanner

Fully managed relational database with unlimited scale, strong consistency, and up to 99.999% availability.

New customers get $300 in free credits to spend on Spanner. In addition, all customers can create a 90-day Spanner free trial instance with 10 GB of storage, not charged against their credits.

  • Get all the benefits of relational semantics and SQL with unlimited scale

  • Start at any size and scale with no limits as your needs grow. Get started with a free trial

  • Enjoy high availability with zero scheduled downtime and online schema changes

  • Deliver high-performance ACID transactions with strong consistency over regions and continents

  • Focus on innovation, automating cumbersome tasks such as manual database sharding

Benefits

Scale as needed with no limits

Globally distributed, ACID-compliant cloud database that automatically handles replicas, sharding, and transaction processing, so you can quickly scale to meet any usage pattern and ensure success of products.

Make your database highly available anywhere

Cloud Spanner is built on Google’s dedicated network and battle tested by Google services used by billions. It offers up to 99.999% availability with zero downtime for planned maintenance and schema changes.

Do fewer thankless tasks with a simpler experience

IT admins and DBAs are inundated with operating databases. With Cloud Spanner, creating or scaling a globally replicated database now takes a handful of clicks and reduces your cost of maintaining databases.

Key features

Key features

Relational database, built for scale

Everything you would expect from a relational database—schemas, SQL queries, and ACID transactions—battle tested and ready to scale globally.

High availability

Cloud Spanner delivers industry-leading high availability (99.999%) for multi-regional instances—10x less downtime than four nines—and provides transparent, synchronous replication across region and multi-region configurations.

Automatic database sharding

Cloud Spanner optimizes performance by automatically sharding the data based on request load and size of the data. As a result, you can spend less time worrying about how to scale your database and instead focus on scaling your business.

View all features

What's new

What's new

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Documentation

Documentation

Google Cloud Basics
Spanner free trial instances

A Spanner free trial instance lets you learn Spanner features and capabilities at no cost for up to 90 days. You can store 10 GB of data to test out key features.

Use Case
Use cases where Spanner is transforming businesses

Learn how Spanner powers business-critical applications in retail, financial services, gaming, media and entertainment, technology, healthcare and more.

Tutorial
Cloud Spanner: Qwik Start

Learn how to create a Cloud Spanner instance, database, and table; add a schema, write and modify data, and run a query.

APIs & Libraries
Spanner Emulator

Spanner Emulator lets application developers do correctness testing when developing an application. The emulator runs in an offline environment.

Google Cloud Basics
What makes Spanner tick?

Take a deep dive into how Cloud Spanner works and how it serves as the foundation for a lot of other Google products and services.

Best Practice
SQL best practices

Learn best practices for constructing SQL statements to help Cloud Spanner find efficient execution plans.

Google Cloud Basics
Instances

Learn the concepts of Cloud Spanner instances, instance configurations, and nodes. See the differences and tradeoffs between regional and multi-region instances.

Google Cloud Basics
Transactions

See the general properties and semantics of transactions in Cloud Spanner as well as the read-write, read-only, and Partitioned DML transaction interfaces. 

Architecture
Concepts

Learn about Spanner concepts from replication to audit logging, as well as advanced concepts such as sessions.

Use cases

Use cases

Use case
Develop global multiplayer games with Spanner

Spanner is a distributed, globally scalable SQL database service that decouples compute from storage, which makes it possible to scale processing resources separately from storage. This distributed scaling nature of Spanner’s architecture makes it an ideal solution for unpredictable workloads such as online games. Learn how to get started developing global multiplayer games using Spanner, in this whitepaper.

gaming architectural diagram

All features

All features

Relational database, built for scale Everything you would expect from a relational database—schemas, SQL queries, and ACID transactions—battle-tested and ready to scale for both reads and writes globally.
99.999% availability Industry-leading high availability (up to 99.999%) for multi-regional instances with TrueTime atomic clocks and transparent, synchronous replication. 100% online schema changes and maintenance while serving traffic with zero downtime.
Automatic database sharding Optimize performance by automatically sharding the data based on request load and data size. As a result, you can scale your database without disruptive re-architecture, and focus on growing your business.
Fully managed Easy deployment at every stage and for any size database. Synchronous replication and maintenance are automatic and built in.
Strong transactional consistency Purpose-built for industry-leading external consistency without compromising on scalability or availability.
Granular instance sizing Start with Spanner with a granular instance for only $65/month and scale it based on your needs without downtime and with no need for re-architecting. Learn more.
PostgreSQL interface Combine the scalability and reliability of Spanner with the familiarity and portability of PostgreSQL. Use the skills and tools that your teams already know, future-proofing your investment for peace of mind. Learn more
Regional and multi-regional configurations No matter where your users may be, apps backed by Spanner can read and write up-to-date strongly consistent data globally. Additionally, when running a multi-region instance, your database is protected against a regional failure and offers industry-leading 99.999% availability.
Unified analytics and AI on transactional data Query data in Spanner from BigQuery in real time without moving or copying the data, bridging the gap between operational data and analytics and creating a unified data life cycle. Invoke Vertex AI models in transactions in Spanner using a simple SQL query (Preview).
Built on Google Cloud network Cloud Spanner is built on Google’s dedicated network that provides low-latency, security, and reliability for serving users across the globe.
Enterprise-grade security and controls Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK), data-layer encryption, IAM integration for access and controls, and comprehensive audit logging. Support for VPC-SC, Access Transparency and Access Approval. Fine-grained access control lets you authorize access to Spanner data at the table and column level. 
Backup and Restore, point-in-time recovery (PITR) Backup your database to store a consistent copy of data and restore on demand. PITR provides continuous data protection with the ability to recover your past data to a microsecond granularity.
Rich application and tool support Meet development teams where they are with native client libraries for Java/JDBC, Go, Python, C#, Node.js, PHP, Ruby and C++ as well as the most popular ORMs, including Hibernate and Entity Framework.
Real-time change data capture and replication Use Datastream to deliver change data from Oracle and MySQL databases into Spanner for up-to-date information. Use Spanner change streams to capture change data from Spanner databases and integrate it with other systems for analytics, event triggering, and compliance. 
Observability Monitor performance of Spanner databases with metrics and stats. Analyze usage patterns in Spanner databases with Key Visualizer, an interactive monitoring tool. Use Query Insights for visualizing query performance metrics and debugging issues in the Google Cloud console.

Pricing

Pricing

Pricing for Spanner is simple and predictable. You are only charged for the compute capacity of your instance (as measured in number of nodes or processing units), the amount of storage that your database's tables and secondary indexes use (not pre-provisioned), backup storage, and the amount of network egress. Note that there is no additional charge for replication of data between zones or regions in an instance. See the pricing guide for more details.

Feature Pricing

Compute capacity

(as measured in number of nodes or processing units, including all replications.)  

Regional pricing (USD): From $0.90 per node per hr

Multi-region pricing (USD): From $3.00 per node per hr

(You can save upto 40% on these rates using Spanner committed use discounts)

Database Storage

Regional pricing (USD): From $0.30 per GB per month

Multi-region pricing (USD): From $0.50 per GB per month

Backup Storage

Regional pricing (USD): $0.10 per GB per month

Multi-region pricing (USD): $0.30 per GB per month

Network ingress Free
Network egress Cross-region and internet egress rates may apply

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Google Cloud SKUs apply.

Partners

Work with a partner with Spanner expertise

Take advantage of our growing partner ecosystem to help you maximize value from Cloud Spanner.