Ace the Google Cloud Certified Associate Engineer Exam 2025 – Skyrocket Your Cloud Skills!

Google's horizontally scalable SQL database is known as Spanner. It is specifically designed to provide the scalability of NoSQL systems while also offering the consistency and relational capabilities of traditional SQL databases. This unique combination allows Spanner to handle large volumes of transactional data across many nodes and geographic locations without compromising on performance or reliability.

Spanner operates with features such as automatic sharding and replication, which allows it to seamlessly scale out by adding more nodes as needed. Its ability to maintain ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties across distributed transactions is a significant advantage for applications that require reliable data integrity and transactional support at scale.

The other options listed serve different purposes in the Google Cloud ecosystem. For example, the Deployment Manager is a service for managing infrastructure as code, the Pricing Calculator helps estimate costs associated with cloud services, and the Cloud SDK is a set of tools for interacting with Google Cloud resources via command-line interface. None of these alternatives offer the same database capabilities as Spanner, highlighting its distinctive role as a horizontally scalable SQL solution.