Google Cloud Platform in Action

Chapter 6. Cloud Spanner: large-scale SQL

This chapter covers

• What is NewSQL?
• What is Spanner?
• Administrative interactions with Cloud Spanner
• Reading, writing, and querying data
• Interleaved tables, primary keys, and other advanced topics

So far we’ve looked at relational (SQL) databases and nonrelational (NoSQL) databases and learned about some of the trade-offs of each. SQL databases generally provide richer queries, strong consistency, and transactional semantics but have trouble handling massive amounts of traffic. NoSQL databases tend to trade some or all of these in exchange for horizontal scalability, which allows the system to easily handle more traffic by adding more machines to the cluster. Obviously, the choice you make between ...