Break down walled gardens with lakehouse integrations
To build real-time AI applications, developers need to combine live transactional context with massive historical insights at sub-millisecond latencies. Today, 98% of our largest data cloud customers are running their operational and analytical workloads on Google’s Agentic Data Cloud.
We’re announcing:
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Lakehouse federation for AlloyDB (Preview): AlloyDB customers can now access live data from Iceberg and BigQuery from the PostgreSQL data plane. Users can discover and search for any BigQuery or Lakehouse for Apache Iceberg table directly from the AlloyDB Studio UI and begin querying immediately, with pushdown to BigQuery for filters and aggregations. This allows live joins between AlloyDB’s transactional data and historical insights in BigQuery or Iceberg without any data movement.
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Reverse ETL for BigQuery (Preview): Many customers use BigQuery and Lakehouse to combine structured warehouse data with rich context from the data lake using tools like Apache Spark or BigQuery ML. Now, with our new one-click Reverse ETL, customers can activate these insights and sync data from the lakehouse to AlloyDB with a single click. AlloyDB acts as a high-concurrency, low-latency serving layer, optimized to meet the needs of real-time and agentic applications. Excellent serving performance is powered by AlloyDB’s unique columnar engine and ultra-fast cache, available at no additional cost.
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Seamless ongoing replication with Datastream (GA): To close the data loop, Datastream now allows users to replicate data continuously to BigQuery and, importantly, to Iceberg tables directly from AlloyDB. This ensures operational changes are quickly reflected in the analytical environment, crucial for real-time ML feature engineering. Datastream is simple to set up, fully serverless, and offers a free tier for AlloyDB to BigQuery streams.
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Knowledge Catalog, formerly Dataplex (Preview): The Knowledge Catalog is a universal context engine which maps and infers business meaning across your entire data estate, using a rigorous framework of aggregation, continuous enrichment, and search. It works by aggregating native context across your Google and partner data platforms, semantic models, and third-party catalogs, unifying them into a single, governed source of truth.Governance is consistently applied, access controls are managed centrally, and full visibility and security are maintained across the entire data lifecycle.
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Spanner Columnar Engine (GA): This capability accelerates analytical queries by speeding up scans up to 200 times on live operational data. By storing data in a columnar format alongside traditional row-based storage, Spanner can execute complex queries automatically using vectorized execution — processing batches of data at once rather than row-by-row. Spanner also now supports Iceberg tables, continuous reverse ETL from BigQuery, and accelerated federated queries — all using the Spanner columnar engine.
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Database Center with BigQuery (Preview): Database Center now supports BigQuery alongside operational databases and self-managed databases on Google Compute Engine. You can now monitor your entire data estate — from the databases running your critical applications to the warehouses analyzing your business — from a single, intelligent management plane. Additionally, Gemini-powered fleet analytics now proactively surfaces performance optimization opportunities across your environment. And with our new API and managed MCP support, you gain the freedom to stream these rich fleet metrics directly into your preferred third-party tools and custom dashboards.
“Our partnership with Google Cloud is focused on building a smarter, faster exchange. Google’s Agentic Data Cloud allows us to dismantle the legacy silos and technical debt that once slowed us down. By integrating the operational reliability of Cloud SQL with the deep reasoning of BigQuery, we’ve created a data ecosystem where our developers and AI agents can validate, optimize, and innovate in real time.”
—Kristofer Shane Sikora, Executive Director, Cloud Data Engineering, CME Group
Commitment to open data and multi-cloud flexibility
We recognize how critical databases are for the day-to-day operations of all your applications. We continue to innovate on industry-leading reliability, price/performance, and scale, while maintaining a focus on open source and open data formats like Iceberg, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Valkey.
To simplify enterprise-grade deployments, we’re announcing:
- Spanner Omni (Preview): A new downloadable edition of Spanner that extends the industry’s leading distributed database beyond Google Cloud. Spanner Omni empowers organizations to use Spanner’s unparalleled scalability, high availability, strong consistency, enterprise-grade security and fully interoperable, multi-model capabilities for AI-enabled applications in their own data centers, across clouds or even at the edge.
