Professional Cloud ArchitectManage and provision solution infrastructureHard
A company is designing a new globally distributed application on Google Cloud that requires a highly scalable, strongly consistent, and transactional database. The application needs to handle millions of reads and writes per second with low latency across multiple continents. It also needs to support standard SQL for querying. Which Google Cloud database service should they choose?
- ACloud SQL
- BCloud Firestore
- CBigQuery
- DCloud Spanner
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Cloud Spanner
Cloud Spanner is a unique, globally distributed, horizontally scalable, relational database that offers strong consistency, high availability, and transactional integrity with SQL support, specifically designed for applications requiring global scale and demanding performance characteristics.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Cloud SQL is a regional relational database, not designed for global, horizontal scalability with strong consistency across continents at millions of operations per second.
- B. Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database, not relational, and while scalable, it doesn't offer the strong transactional consistency across continents and SQL support like Spanner.
- C. BigQuery is an analytical data warehouse, not a transactional database for OLTP applications requiring millions of reads/writes per second with strong consistency.
Cloud Spanner
A globally distributed, strongly consistent, and horizontally scalable relational database service offered by Google Cloud.
- Combines benefits of relational databases with horizontal scalability.
- Offers strong consistency and transactional integrity globally.
- Supports standard SQL for querying.
Memory trick: Spanner spans the globe, strongly consistent, SQL in its soul.