Google’s new cloud service is a unique take on a database

Google has turned a database service that it uses to run some of its mission-critical products into an offering for its public cloud customers.

On Tuesday, the company launched Cloud Spanner, a new fully managed database that’s supposed to provide the transactional consistency of a traditional database plus the scalability and performance of a NoSQL database. It’s based on the same systems that run the company’s own Spanner database internally.

Usually, businesses have to pick either a traditional or a NoSQL database, and each comes with particular trade-offs. Traditional databases provide better transactional consistency, but can be hard to scale. NoSQL databases are better at scaling but sacrifice consistency.

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