Google Cloud unveils major updates to data analytics tools

Google Cloud has announced a series of updates to its Data Analytics and Databases portfolios, aiming to enhance its support for customers in the data-to-AI journey. These updates encompass Spanner Graph, full-text search, approximate neighbour vector search in Spanner, new Spanner editions, Bigtable distributed counters, SQL support for Bigtable, an Enterprise Plus edition to Cloud SQL for SQL Server, and new features in Looker and BigQuery.

Spanner Graph expands the multi-model capabilities of Spanner to include graph processing, facilitating the creation of AI applications that leverage knowledge graphs and Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). According to Google Cloud, Spanner Graph offers virtually unlimited scalability, industry-leading availability, and consistent performance, making it suitable for large-scale, mission-critical graph applications. The integration of Spanner Graph with Vertex AI allows users to access predictive and generative models directly through the Spanner Graph schema and query. This facilitates tasks such as generating text embeddings for graph nodes and edges and performing vector searches to retrieve semantic data.

Highlighting the capabilities of Spanner Graph, Google Cloud explained that it can be used in multiple scenarios, including product recommendations, financial fraud detection, social networks, gaming, and network security. For instance, in product recommendations, Spanner Graph can model the relationships between users, products, and preferences to build context-rich knowledge graphs. In financial fraud detection, it can identify suspicious connections by representing accounts, transactions, and individuals naturally. Social networks can benefit from efficient discovery of mutual friends and shared interests. In gaming, it can manage connections such as players, characters, items, and locations to enhance game mechanics. For network security, Spanner Graph provides a comprehensive view of device interdependencies and user events over time, aiding in proactive threat detection.

Google Cloud also introduced full-text search and approximate neighbour vector search in Spanner. Full-text search builds on Google's expertise in search technology, providing advanced, scalable text search capabilities. The approximate neighbour vector search employs Google Cloud's ScaNN algorithm, enabling the indexing and searching of vector embeddings for AI-driven semantic search purposes.

To offer customers more flexibility and transparency, Spanner is now available in Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus editions. This new pricing model adopts a per server billing approach and decouples compute and network replication costs.

Bigtable distributed counters and SQL support for Bigtable are among other notable updates. The distributed counters facilitate real-time embedded analytics for large-scale applications, while SQL support allows developers to leverage their SQL skills for querying Bigtable data, maintaining data model flexibility. This marks the biggest change to Bigtable since its inception over 20 years ago.

Cloud SQL for SQL Server now includes an Enterprise Plus edition, which reportedly offers up to four times improved read performance compared to the Enterprise edition. Additionally, Google Cloud announced new capabilities in Looker, such as AI-powered formula assist and slide generation, which are now available in preview. These features enable customers to interact with their business data more dynamically and gain insights efficiently.

BigQuery's updates also include new functionalities powered by Gemini. Now generally available, Gemini in BigQuery provides AI-driven experiences for tasks like data preparation, exploration, analysis, and governance. It also offers intelligent recommendations to enhance user productivity and cost optimisation. Users such as Indonesian fintech provider Julo have reported significant improvements in their workflow efficiency thanks to Gemini in BigQuery.

Google Cloud's updates reaffirm its commitment to supporting customers in their AI adoption journey, providing a robust set of tools to build intelligent, scalable, and efficient enterprise applications.