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Database / Google Spanner Database Interview questions

What is Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, horizontally scalable relational database that combines the strong consistency and SQL support of traditional databases with the scale of distributed NoSQL systems.

It spreads data across multiple zones or regions and uses synchronous Paxos-based replication together with the TrueTime API to guarantee external consistency, even when a transaction touches rows stored on different machines. Resharding, replica placement, and failover are all handled automatically, so a single table can grow to petabytes without an engineer manually splitting shards.

Spanner supports two query dialects, GoogleSQL and a PostgreSQL-compatible dialect, and is commonly used for globally distributed workloads such as financial ledgers, ad-serving platforms, and multiplayer game backends that cannot tolerate either downtime or inconsistent reads.

What combination of properties best describes Spanner?
Which two query dialects does Spanner support?

More Related questions...

What is Google Cloud Spanner? What are the main features of Google Spanner? What is the purpose of TrueTime in Spanner? Define interleaved tables in Google Spanner? What is a Spanner instance? What are processing units in Google Spanner? Describe primary keys in Google Spanner schema design? What are the supported database dialects in Spanner? List the data types supported by Google Spanner? How do you create a database in Google Spanner? What is a secondary index in Spanner? Explain the purpose of splits in Spanner? What are mutations in Google Spanner? How do you apply schema changes in Spanner? What is the Spanner emulator? Why does Spanner use TrueTime for consistency? How does Spanner achieve external consistency? What is the difference between read-write and read-only transactions in Spanner? When should you use interleaved tables versus foreign keys? What happens when a hotspot occurs in Spanner? How is data partitioned across nodes in Spanner? Why should you avoid monotonically increasing primary keys? What is the difference between Spanner and Cloud SQL? How does Spanner handle schema changes without downtime? When would you choose bounded staleness over strong reads? How can you optimize query performance in Spanner? What is the difference between Data Boost and standard reads? Why do we use commit timestamps in Spanner tables? How does Spanner's query optimizer choose an execution plan? What is the difference between batch DML and partitioned DML? When should you use change streams in Spanner? How is fine-grained access control implemented in Spanner? Why doesn't Spanner support auto-incrementing primary keys? What is the difference between GoogleSQL and PostgreSQL dialects in Spanner? How do you troubleshoot high latency in Spanner queries? Explain the internal working of Paxos in Spanner replication? Explain the execution flow of a read-write transaction in Spanner? Explain the lifecycle of a split in Spanner? How does Spanner guarantee external consistency across regions? What happens internally when Spanner commits a distributed transaction? How can you optimize a multi-region Spanner configuration for latency? Which is better and why: multi-region or regional Spanner configuration for a global app? How does directed reads improve read latency in multi-region Spanner? Why is clock skew uncertainty critical to Spanner's TrueTime API? How do you troubleshoot transaction aborts in Spanner? Explain the internal working of the Spanner query execution engine? What happens when a leader region becomes unavailable in Spanner? How does Spanner implement point-in-time recovery internally? Explain the execution flow of a partitioned DML statement in Spanner? How can you optimize schema design to avoid hotspotting at scale?
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