It appears that Google is coming closer to releasing a productized version of Spanner, the next-generation, distributed SQL database that underpins a number of its consumer services, judging from statements by Google cloud platforms vice president Brian Stevens in an interview with the Register:
Speaking to The Reg, Stevens promised "big new services" in SQL databases at scale from Google, but sidestepped the details.
"The world has never seen a distributed version of SQL – never seen a single instance of SQL that scales 100 per cent. That's why you had NoSQL," he said.
"We have been putting it in the hands of early access – putting technology in the hands of select customers before productising.
"After that we will make a production decision. We are getting encouraging signals back on that – it's one of the more traditional IT things we are working on."
Google described Spanner's architecture and intent in a 2012 paper:
At the highest level of abstraction, it is a database that shards data across many sets of Paxos [21] state machines in datacenters spread all over the world. Replication is used for global availability and geographic locality; clients automatically failover between replicas. Spanner automatically reshards data across machines as the amount of data or the number of servers changes, and it automatically migrates data across machines (even across datacenters) to balance load and in response to failures. Spanner is designed to scale up to millions of machines across hundreds of datacenters and trillions of database rows.
Reports have emerged about a commercial version of Spanner since at least 2013, but only Stevens' recent statements to the Register come close to an official declaration that one is close in coming. Last year, a report in the Information suggested that Google has been challenged in commercializing Spanner because it's so tightly bound to its proprietary software and hardware infrastructure.
The Bottom Line
It's important to underscore that Stevens' statements notwithstanding, Google hasn't made any official announcements. But Google has an opportunity to meet a real market need with a commercial version of Spanner, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.
"Spanner promises a database service with real differentiation," Henschen says. "It's not an Oracle Database competitor, like AWS Aurora. It's a next-generation, SQL database with the massive scalability and global deployment capabilites of NoSQL databases like Cassandra and Riak. It's not every enterprise that will be interested in such a service, but there's clearly a market at the high end."
"NoSQL vendors constantly tout their scalability advantages over conventional relational databases, yet most also come out with SQL-like features and querying capabilites of one sort or another with each new release," Henschen adds. "It's clear that there's big demand for the combination of familiar SQL with the ultimate in scalability and global deployment possibilities."
Few tech companies can lay a greater claim to scalability and global reach than Google, a fact that would give a productized version of Spanner immense credibility from release one. Watch this space.
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