Database / Google Spanner Database Interview questions
What are processing units in Google Spanner?
Processing units are Spanner's fine-grained measure of compute capacity, introduced so customers don't have to provision a full node just to get started. 1,000 processing units equal one node, and capacity can be provisioned in increments as small as 100 processing units.
| Nodes | Use case |
| Whole-node increments | Larger, predictable production workloads |
| Processing units (100 PU steps) | Small workloads, dev/test, gradual scale-up |
Processing units let a team start with a fraction of a node's cost and storage limit, then scale up smoothly as query load or data volume grows, rather than jumping straight to a full node's worth of capacity and price.
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