Google announces general availability of Cloud Spanner change streams

Google has announced the general availability of change streams, which allows users to track and stream out changes (inserts, updates, and deletes) from their Cloud Spanner database in near real-time.

Cloud Spanner change streams is available to all customers at no additional cost. You will have to pay only for any extra compute and storage of the change stream data at the regular Spanner rates.

"Since change streams are built right into Spanner, there's no software to install, and you get external consistency, industry-leading availability, and effortless scale with the rest of the database," the company wrote in a blog post.

Introduced at this year's Google Data Cloud Summit, change streams let you capture change data from Spanner databases and easily integrate it with other systems to unlock new value. Common use cases include:

• Replicating Spanner data changes to a data warehouse, such as BigQuery, for analytics.
• Triggering application logic based on data changes sent to a message queue, such as Pub/Sub.
• Storing data changes in Cloud Storage, for compliance or archival purposes.

Change streams are highly flexible and configurable, letting you capture change data for the exact data you care about, and for the exact period of time that matters for your business.