If you are a data engineer or a cloud architect, you probably need to design and deploy a SQL database solution. SQL databases are the most commonly used because of the power of the data model they follow: the relational data model. By choosing an SQL database, you can perform operations matching different tables using joins, and you can perform transactions that follow the ACID (Atomicity Consistency Independency Durability) pattern.

Because of that importance, it's also important to have highly reliable and scalable SQL databases. Google Cloud offers Cloud Spanner. It is a fully managed and unlimited scale SQL database that allows you to deploy your production-ready solution within minutes. Cloud Spanner is ready to scale from very few transactions to globally executed operations. It also provides you automatic sharding for the data, so you can distribute them between different nodes and leverage them for queries and other operations in the most efficient way.

In this lab, you will create a Google Cloud Spanner instance with a single node, you will create a database and specify the schema for a table, and you will execute some SQL statements on that table.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:

• Create a Google Cloud Spanner instance
• Set up a database with its own schema
• Execute SQL statements on the Cloud Spanner database

Intended Audience

• Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer (PDE) candidates
• Data engineers who want to release a fully managed and scalable SQL database solution
• Individuals that want to understand how to leverage Cloud Spanner to deliver production-ready solutions

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of SQL is appreciated but not required. You could follow the following labs:

• Run Your First SQL Queries

Updates

April 6th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI