Google Cloud Spanner
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 9 distributed databases by recommenders
Google's globally distributed relational database, recommended for strong consistency, easy scaling and smooth operations. The most common caveat is cost, which critics call high.
Google's globally distributed relational database, recommended for strong consistency, easy scaling and smooth operations. The most common caveat is cost, which critics call high.
25 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 23
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 92%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 23 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 12 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong consistency across regions
“If you get commit timestamps from Spanner you can compare them to determine exactly which commit happened first.”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “Clock Synchronization Is a Nightmare” “gets about as close as engineering can come to making the CAP theorem feel irrelevant during normal operation”
Comment from 6 Aug 2026 in “The next chapter of our AI momentum” Scales without fuss, globally
“I've found this database to be the fastest, multi region, globally distributed database by far.”
Comment from 1 Jun 2026 in “Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync)” “it actually scales without fuss”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “Ok, but does it scale?” “systems like Spanner exist & I think the fact that it's used for Gmail, Docs, etc. has demonstrated that for a large range of OLTP workloads”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers” Proven reliable, well-engineered service
“both of which have been in full-service, reliable operation since 2012”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1” “Infra Spanner is correctly described as a "generational achievement".”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “A History of IDEs at Google” “They made impressive technologies that still hold up today”
Comment from 12 Jul 2026 in “The 'Father of the Internet' is finally retiring” Good fit for relational workloads
“the most cost-effective relational DB option (out of the ones I looked it)”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “Ok, but does it scale?” “Spanner just has a few nice properties for our scale.”
Comment from 13 Oct 2026 in “Redesigning source control at Anthropic” “systems like Spanner exist & I think the fact that it's used for Gmail, Docs, etc. has demonstrated that for a large range of OLTP workloads”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Expensive, costs a lot of money
“Spanner (Google) does make a good job of using atomic clocks, but it takes a hang of a lot of money.”
Comment from 23 Oct 2026 in “UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities” “Spanner is amazing but also amazingly expensive”
Comment from 10 Sep 2026 in “Neki – Sharded Postgres” “recommended us to use something like Spanner - which was totally not the solution to the problem, not to mention, expensive.”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “AI Is Killing B2B SaaS”
Other distributed databases people recommend
The four most recommended other distributed databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FoundationDB | 26 | 6 | 81% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Google Cloud SpannerThis page | 23 | 2 | 92% | 9 | — | Approved |
| CockroachDB | 19 | 11 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| rqlite | 13 | 4 | 76% | 5 | — | Approved |
| Apache Cassandra | 12 | 15 | 44% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
27 of the 29 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, GKE are all best-in-class.”
“Spanner (Google) does make a good job of using atomic clocks, but it takes a hang of a lot of money.”
“The others are similarly impressive.”
“Spanner just has a few nice properties for our scale.”
“Spanner is amazing but also amazingly expensive”
“the most cost-effective relational DB option (out of the ones I looked it)”
“support for nearly transparent rolling upgrades of the database with very little impact to a running workload. Spanner is best in class at this.”
“it actually scales without fuss”
“in every other way it does what it can do to improve things at every level”
“Admittedly I'm spoilt by Spanner”
“gets about as close as engineering can come to making the CAP theorem feel irrelevant during normal operation”
“They made impressive technologies that still hold up today”
“they solved real, hard problems the company was facing for which there were no good external solutions”
“it's pretty performant (as long as you account for hot spots)”
“I've found this database to be the fastest, multi region, globally distributed database by far.”
“Infra Spanner is correctly described as a "generational achievement".”
“between Chubby and Spanner, if Google had bought GitHub we wouldn't be having these problems”
“you don't even have to do anything that wild to hit the Spanner 100MB limit”
“systems like Spanner exist & I think the fact that it's used for Gmail, Docs, etc. has demonstrated that for a large range of OLTP workloads”
“recommended us to use something like Spanner - which was totally not the solution to the problem, not to mention, expensive.”
“having a local simulator (DynamoDB, Spanner, others) helps me a lot for offline/local development and CI”
“his team was effectively bullying physics into behaving”
“If you get commit timestamps from Spanner you can compare them to determine exactly which commit happened first.”
“the only database you should use is GCP Spanner”
“DynamoDB and Spanner are both great, but they're meant to be run by a single admin.”
“both of which have been in full-service, reliable operation since 2012”
“would still use Spanner for some tasks with an infinite budget”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.