A look at operational performance
Looking at the Critical Capabilities Ratings, we believe Spanner’s performance is why it continues to be recognized across a variety of categories:
- #1 in Lightweight Transactions Use Case (second year in a row): As microservices and event-driven architectures become the norm, the ability to handle high-frequency, low-latency transactions is paramount. We feel Spanner’s #1 ranking shows it is the most efficient engine for these modern workloads.
- Distributed Transactions Support (Score: 5.0/5.0): Spanner is the only service to receive a 5.0 for the ability to support distributed transactions across multiple nodes, regions and geographies.
- AI/Machine Learning and GenAI (Score: 4.6/5.0): We believe this score is the result of the massive wave of innovation we undertook in 2025 to integrate AI directly into Spanner.
- Transactional Consistency (Score: 4.9/5.0): Spanner offers external consistency at planet-scale, helping ensure that every transaction is globally accurate, every time.
- #2 in OLTP Use Case: Spanner is increasingly being used for traditional, high-volume transactional workloads, thanks to, in our view, its “infinite” horizontal scale, which makes it a top-tier choice for legacy migrations.
These positionings, to us, signal that Spanner has evolved from a specialized solution for global scale into the most technically capable database suitable for nearly any mission-critical application.
The foundation for the agentic enterprise
In 2025, Spanner became the “brain” of AI agents, driven by a number of new capabilities:
- Spanner Graph (now GA): A unified graph and relational experience. With Spanner Graph, you can traverse complex relationships using ISO-standard GQL alongside SQL. This is critical for building knowledge graphs that ground AI agents in real-world facts.
- Integrated hybrid search: Generally available since 2025, Spanner supports high-scale full text and vector search directly within its SQL and Graph modalities, allowing for integrated, low-latency retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at scale.
- Spanner columnar engine: This architectural breakthrough enables analytical queries to run up to 200× faster on live operational data served from Iceberg tables, providing agents with the real-time context they need without the “ETL tax.”
- Expanded interoperability: With new Cassandra-compatible APIs, we’ve made it easier than ever to bring scale-out workloads to Spanner with zero code changes, so that your legacy data can participate in the AI revolution.
A blueprint for tomorrow
In our opinion, the Gartner recognition validates our belief that the future of data is unified, open, and inseparable from AI. Every day, we see customers leveraging Spanner’s recent innovations:
- Palo Alto Networks: As a global cybersecurity leader, Palo Alto Networks relies on Spanner to be the heart of its multi-tenant architecture. By leveraging Spanner’s 99.999% availability and Spanner Graph, they have unlocked crucial access-control use cases at planet-scale. This integrated approach allows them to secure AI at scale, stitching together a cohesive architecture that manages critical customer workflows without the need for specialized graph database silos.
- Mercado Libre: The Latin American e-commerce and fintech giant uses Spanner for its foundational consistency and scale. By integrating Spanner with their internal “Fury” platform, they manage millions of daily financial transactions with near-perfect uptime. They leverage Spanner data boost for real-time analytics without impacting transactional performance, and they are now using Spanner as the reliable memory store for their next generation of AI-driven financial agents.
- Unico: This leading IDTech company prevents billions in fraud by facilitating over 1.2 billion digital identity authentications, since 2021. Spanner’s integrated vector search allows Unico to perform complex 1:N facial biometric searches across billions of vectors with high precision and low latency. This eliminates the need for a separate vector database, so that their “Identity Network” remains fast, accurate, and maintenance-free.
Ready to see why Spanner was recognized?
The future of data is unified and built for AI. By ranking #1 in Lightweight Transactions and we believe Spanner is the premier choice for your mission-critical applications.
Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for Operational Use Cases, By Ramke Ramakrishnan, Masud Miraz, Xingyu Gu, Henry Cook, Aaron Rosenbaum, November 19, 2025.
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