Applications of the future must provide dynamic, AI-driven experiences at unknown scale and with minimal downtime, therefore databases from yesterday are insufficient. In order to facilitate the process of modernising database workloads from MySQL to Spanner, Google Cloud’s horizontally scalable, always-on operational database, Google Cloud unveiled expanded capabilities, enhanced performance, and migration tools at Google Cloud Next 25.
It’s now simpler to move your apps from MySQL to Spanner.
Simply said, MySQL was not built to meet the most demanding availability and scale requirements of today. Common solutions, such as manual replication or sharding, are dangerous and complicated, and they arrive just when the company is least prepared to accept them. Costly after-market solutions are usually needed for planning and implementing scaling on self-managed databases. These solutions might take months to design and test, taking development teams away from more urgent user-facing features. Additionally, companies frequently plan for peak consumption even if that capacity is rarely used due to the overhead of scaling.
Applications of the future must be able to do more than merely execute transactions. Different approaches to data storage and querying are needed for new experiences including dynamic pricing, collaborative suggestions, real-time fraud detection, and semantic discovery.
Simpler live migrations from MySQL to Spanner
Spanner offers a clear migration route to securely and simply transfer production workloads from MySQL with almost no downtime, assisting enterprises that are having trouble expanding and modernising their applications. Once there, they may benefit from Spanner’s full-text search, rich graph, integrated AI, and hands-free dependability.
Petabyte-sized sharded MySQL databases can be consolidated in days rather than months to the Spanner migration tool, which automates schema and data movement to support live cutovers. Updated built-in reverse replication synchronises data back from Spanner to sharded MySQL instances to enable near real-time failover in a disaster scenario, and improved data movement templates offer increased throughput at significantly lower cost along with new flexibility to transform data as it’s migrated. Lastly, the ability to customise implementations is made possible by new Terraform setups and CLI interaction.
Reduced code and query changes and improved latency
Google Cloud added a robust new set of relational features to Spanner that closely map to MySQL in order to substantially lower the cost and complexity of moving application code and queries.
MySQL’s default isolation level, repeatable read, strikes a balance between consistency and performance. Spanner’s current serialisable isolation is enhanced with new repeated read isolation, which is currently under preview. MySQL developers will be accustomed to it, and it provides them with more tools to boost efficiency considerably. In fact, compared to what was previously feasible in Spanner, the majority of popular workloads can experience a 5x improvement in latency. The modifications needed to move an application to Spanner are also significantly decreased by the addition of additional auto_increment keys, SELECT…FOR UPDATE, and over 80 new MySQL procedures.
According to a recent Forrester Consulting overall Economic Impact study, Spanner offered a composite organisation representative of the clients surveyed a 132% return on investment and $7.74 million in overall benefits over a three-year period. This is mostly due to the retirement of self-managed databases and the utilisation of Spanner’s integrated, hands-free, high availability operations and elastic scalability. Development teams were able to take advantage of new opportunities without having to deal with complicated re-architecture projects or new capital expenditures because to Spanner’s ability to lessen disruptions from unplanned downtime and system maintenance.
Summary
The advantages of switching from MySQL to Spanner, emphasising how conventional databases like MySQL find it difficult to meet the availability and scalability requirements of contemporary applications. The Spanner migration tool, one of the new tools and features introduced in the article, is intended to streamline the migrating process with the least amount of downtime. In order to minimise code modifications and enhance application performance following migration, it also highlights enhancements to Spanner’s relational capabilities and new isolation levels. The article concludes with facts and testimonies indicating that switching to Spanner offers substantial cost savings and a solid return on investment because of its scalable and managed features.
