This course covers practical aspects of working with Cloud Spanner, Google's proprietary relational database management system (RDBMS) service. It is the only globally distributed, strongly consistent RDBMS with horizontal scaling.
Relational Databases have traditionally relied on vertical scaling, but Google's Cloud Spanner is carefully architected to provide horizontal scaling and global replication with all the rigors of strong consistency. Because Spanner is such a unique product, getting the best out of it does require you to understand its subtleties. In this course, Creating and Administering Google Cloud Spanner Instances, you will gain the ability to identify when Spanner is the right tool for you, and then correctly design your data and configure your instance to get the best out of Spanner's formidable capabilities. First, you will learn where Cloud Spanner fits in the suite of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) storage technologies and how it compares to BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and others. Next, you will discover Spanner's data model and how it enables horizontal scaling. Finally, you will explore how to use Spanner in conjunction with other GCP services, notably Dataflow templates, for migrating data into Spanner. When you are finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of Cloud Spanner needed to architect solutions to problems that require global replication, strong consistency, and horizontal scaling in a relational database management system (RDBMS).