Google’s database, Cloud Spanner, has been deployed globally since 2017. The concept behind it is to replicate databases worldwide, catering to global organizations with clients scattered across different countries, requiring high stability and better scalability. However, Spanner has its limitations – with extremely large data, global data replication could be costly. Recently, Google introduced the geo-partitioning feature, allowing the splitting of table segments in the database to be stored in specific data centers.
Google exemplifies this usage in online games, where the same game segregates players based on regions like North America, Europe, and Asia. For instance, data of players in a specific region (e.g., asia-partition) can be stored solely in data centers in Asia. Additionally, there is a default partition with no segmentation, allowing other data to be retrieved separately on different machines.
Source: Google Cloud
TLDR: Google’s Cloud Spanner offers global database replication, recently introducing geo-partitioning to optimize data storage costs and improve regional data management in online gaming applications.
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