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Spanner is the globally consistent, always-on database with almost infinite scalability that powers a plethora of contemporary applications in many industries. It is now the cornerstone of many forward-thinking companies’ data-driven transformations. Google is launching Spanner throughout graph today, along with new features like vector search, full-text search, and more. With the help of these advancements, businesses can create intelligent apps that seamlessly integrate several data models and condense their operational deployments onto a single, potent database.

From Spanner versions, you may choose the Standard Edition, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus editions with the right set of capabilities to fit your needs and budget.

With Spanner Graph, you can easily and succinctly match patterns, navigate relationships, and filter results across interconnected data for popular graph use cases like fraud detection, community discovery, and personalised recommendations.

Building on Google’s many years of search experience, advanced full-text search offers stronger matching and relevance ranking than unstructured text.

Vector search builds on more than a decade of Google research and innovation in approximate closest neighbour algorithms to facilitate semantic information retrieval, the cornerstone of generative  AI applications.

Furthermore, in response to Google’s enterprise customers’ increasingly complicated needs regarding latency, cost, and compliance, Google has improved Spanner’s basic infrastructure.

With geo-partitioning, you can store some of your data in particular places to provide quick local access while still deploying globally.

Data sovereignty needs are respected and multi-regional availability attributes are provided via dual-region arrangements.

By dynamically adjusting the size of your Spanner deployment, auto-scaling frees you from having to overprovision and enables you to respond swiftly to changes in traffic patterns.

Presenting the Spanner editions

Google is pleased to present Spanner editions, a new tiered pricing structure that enables you to benefit from these advancements while improving cost transparency and cost-saving options. You can select the Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus editions from Spanner editions to match your demands and budget with the appropriate collection of features.

The Standard edition is a feature-rich package that comes with additional features like scheduled backups and reverse ETL from BigQuery in addition to all of the current capabilities that are generally available (GA) in single-region settings. The Enterprise edition leverages multi-model features, such as vector search, enhanced full-text search, and the new Spanner Graph, to enhance the Standard edition.

Moreover, it offers improved data security and operational ease with incremental backups and automated autoscaling. The new geo-partitioning feature and multi-region setups with 99.999% availability are included in the Enterprise Plus version for workloads that demand the greatest levels of availability, performance, compliance, and governance.

Let’s examine each of the Spanner editions in more detail

Standard Edition

Everything you adore about Spanner is present in the standard edition, and then some. Access to Spanner’s single-region configurations, which include transparent failover, synchronous replication, and automatic sharding for almost infinite scalability and 99.99% availability, is provided by the Standard edition. All of the features available in the GA today, including Google’s enterprise-grade security and data protection measures, are included in the standard edition.

Furthermore, Google is adding new features to the Standard edition. Google is growing their offering with additional features like reverse ETL and external datasets with BigQuery, in addition to Spanner’s strong connection with BigQuery, which includes features like Data Boost and BigQuery federation. Google is also added scheduled backups to further its data protection capabilities. These improved features in the Standard edition are available to all Spanner customers.

Customers can gain from Standard edition in the following ways:

Migrate your relational workloads to Spanner to save operational toil, minimise costly scheduled and unplanned downtime, and cut the overall cost of ownership.

Shard MySQL or other complicated application-level sharding using Spanner’s automatic sharding instead.

Spanner’s nativePostgreSQL interface lets you modernise your apps without being locked into outdated features.

Elevate your NoSQL workloads with multirow transactions and stable secondary indexes thanks to support for adapters for Cassandra and DynamoDB that are compatible with APIs.

Avoid complex ETL pipelines and data silos by consolidating your data into a single source-of-truth database and running analytics on up-to-date data with Spanner Data Boost and BigQuery federation.

Utilise reverse ETL to service complicated analytics use-cases from Spanner and BigQuery to compute them at high QPS and low latency.

Enterprise Edition

Expanded data modalities are available to you with the Enterprise edition, enabling you to combine your operational deployments and provide your applications with true multi-model access. Spanner Graph, full-text search, and vector search capabilities are available for your data with the Enterprise edition, in addition to the relational and NoSQL functionality that Spanner currently offers.

The best part is that by combining all of this functionality, Spanner’s primary advantages of high availability, scalability, and consistency can be preserved in a genuine, completely interoperable multi-model database. Having all of your data in one location eliminates the need to transfer data between transactional and speciality databases, allowing you to minimise data silos and duplication, streamline data governance, cut down on operational complexity, and eventually minimise total cost of ownership.

Customers can gain from Enterprise edition in the following ways:

By fusing the advantages of SQL and GQL, you can supercharge your applications with Spanner Graph capabilities at nearly infinite scale. This allows analysts and developers to query linked and structured data in a single action.

Use full-text search to modernise your search apps and streamline your operational pipelines. You may leverage sophisticated search features without copying and indexing data into a separate search solution.

By basing fundamental models on contextual, domain-specific, and real-time data with native vector search capability in your operational data, you may enhance the AI-assisted user experience.

Launch robust multi-model applications, such a generative  AI product that grounds LLMs using relational and knowledge graph RAG approaches, or a searchable product catalogue that mixes traditional and semantic information retrieval through the combination of full-text and vector search.

Enterprise Plus Edition

Spanner’s most feature-rich and widely available edition is called Enterprise Plus. Enterprise Plus includes new dual-region configurations in addition to our 99.999% multi-region options, which let you take advantage of Spanner’s unparalleled availability while also adhering to your data sovereignty needs. You may run a truly global deployment with Enterprise Plus and still retain low latency and data locality for parts of your data by utilising geo-partitioning.

Customers can gain from Enterprise Plus edition in the following ways:

By using Spanner’s multi-region settings for application deployment, you can achieve real 0-RTO and 0-RPO deployments along with 99.999% availability, eliminating the need to construct and manage complex disaster recovery solutions.

Use Spanner’s dual-region configurations in places like Australia, Germany, India, and Japan to meet data sovereignty needs without sacrificing availability.

Partition your data to make it always available where you need it, latency-free, and manage your worldwide deployment while preserving data locality.

Increased openness and cost efficiency

Google is also introducing a more straightforward pricing approach with the new Spanner editions, shifting to per-replica charging and separating the expenses of compute and data replication to improve efficiency and cost transparency. Each edition has various cost-saving features, and switching to a new edition is meant to be a smooth process.

Customers in a single region can purchase the standard edition for the same price. Instead than paying multiple prices for every function, customers can choose the Enterprise version, which has a single price point, if they want increased multi-model and search capabilities. They can also take advantage of the price-performance improvements like incremental backups and managed autoscaler.

Even more, the Enterprise Plus edition offers lower compute expenses, separates computation and replication, and does not charge for witness replica storage. Finally, since configurable read-only replicas will be priced the same as read-write replicas for each edition, customers employing these replicas will benefit from significant cost savings. Making the switch to Spanner editions is easy, and you can take advantage of all the improvements Spanner has to offer while cutting prices.

The availability of the Spanner versions is scheduled for September 24, 2024. See the overview page for Spanner versions for further details.