Spanner (database)


Spanner is a NewSQL database developed by Google. Spanner is a globally distributed database service and storage solution. It provides features such as global transactions, strongly consistent reads, and automatic multi-site replication and failover.

Features

Spanner stores large amounts of mutable structured data. Spanner allows users to perform arbitrary queries using SQL with relational data while maintaining strong consistency and high availability for that data with synchronous replication.
Key features of Spanner:
Spanner joined the Google platform in February 2017. It is available as part of Google Cloud Platform.
Spanner's SQL capability was added in 2017 and documented in a SIGMOD 2017 paper

Architecture

Spanner uses the Paxos algorithm as part of its operation to shard data across hundreds of servers. It makes heavy use of hardware-assisted clock synchronization using GPS clocks and atomic clocks to ensure global consistency.
Google's F1 SQL database management system is built on top of Spanner, replacing Google's custom MySQL variant.