The Free Tier is completely irrelevant here, though. The very reason someone might use Spanner is its excellent scalability. I don't believe there is any reason to use it for smaller projects other than education. The customers who will use Spanners are those for whom CockroachDB is not enough, for example. For everybody with databases that are not that huge PostgreSQL will do just fine.
> If you squint, any database engine is “in memory” if there is more buffer than data.
That is sadly not true, I remember one lonely night debugging a MSSQL 2012 instance that was _very_ slow, and it turned out that for a simple query (one join, 100 rows in one table and 10 in the other, 100 result in total, one where clause) it forced writing the result to disk before evaluating the WHERE condition. Unable to fight the scheduler I've ended up making a ramdisk for this data.
Very true, but most people do not yet no about scale-to-zero pay-for-what-you-use sql server clouds with a free tier like CockroachDB and neon. They think that you must pay $5 a month to run a sql server, which has been the case until very recently, so they go with no sql options to get the free tier.
Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.
> Edit: actualy Spanner looks like another CockroachDB. You use sql to interact with it. In which case I can see many people who would want to use this with a free tier for hobby projects. ie. in between education and production development.
Pedantically, cockroachDB is another spanner. It was made by Google devs who left Google having previously used spanner, and intentionally made something similar to spanner (ish, lots of handwaving happening here)
