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Spanner Foundations

Google Cloud via Coursera

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Details

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

6 weeks, 1 hour a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

English

Found in

Overview

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This foundational course introduces learners to Google Cloud Spanner, the fully managed, mission-critical relational database. Designed primarily for application developers, cloud architects, and database administrators, this course covers the core tenets of Spanner: global consistency, relational schema design, and horizontal scalability. The curriculum is enriched with modern operational context, exploring how Spanner editions optimize costs, how the PostgreSQL interface broadens ecosystem compatibility, and how multi-model capabilities eliminate the need for complex data silos.

Syllabus

Introduction
- Sets the stage for the course. It introduces the overarching business challenge (Cymbal's logistics platform), clearly states the required prerequisites, and outlines the modules ahead to prepare learners for the instructional journey.
Introduction to Cloud Spanner
- Establish what Spanner is. Identify the fundamental problem of scaling relational databases and Spanner's capabilities to overcome the challenges. Describe the editions and modern multi-model features which allow cost optimization.
Architecture and provisioning
- Express how Spanner utilizes compute/storage disaggregation for scalability, Paxos and TruTime for external consistency, and dialect choices (GoogleSQL vs PostgreSQL) for developer flexibility.
Schema design and data ingestion
- Discuss Spanner's distributed storage in splits. Express how this influences schema design and primary key choice. Explain and use different methods for loading data.
Foundational operations and security
- Provides a high-level overview of tools for ongoing monitoring and fine grained access control to apply least-privilege access
Course summary and next steps
- Consolidates the learning journey, summarizing the relational scale problem, Spanner's disaggregated architecture, schema design best practices, and the integration of multi-model/Data Boost capabilities.