Making it easier to build intelligent gen AI apps with game changing capabilities with Spanner Graph, and new generative AI functionality in BigQuery, Looker and more.
Google Cloud today announced a slew of new data cloud innovations to help customers accelerate their AI adoption and build enterprise AI apps that are accurate, relevant, and grounded in enterprise truth.
Powering the next generation of intelligent applications with Spanner Graph
Spanner Graph is Google Cloud’s new groundbreaking offering that unites purpose-built graph database capabilities with Spanner, our always-on, globally consistent, and virtually unlimited-scale database.
Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped appliance is an integrated hardware and software solution that unlocks real-time local data processing for AI use cases such as object detection, medical imaging analysis, and predictive maintenance for critical infrastructure. The appliance can be conveniently transported in a rugged case or mounted in a rack within customer-specific local operating environments.
Now available in Preview, Spanner Graph gives customers the ability to scale beyond trillions of edges while offering industry-leading availability and consistency, and is a great solution for even the most mission-critical graph applications. In particular, Spanner’s transparent sharding can scale elastically to very large data sets and can use massively parallel query processing without any intervention on your part.
Spanner Graph is also deeply integrated with Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s fully managed, unified AI development platform. This enables customers to directly access Vertex AI’s extensive suite of predictive and generative models through the Spanner Graph schema and query, streamlining your AI workflow. For example, you can generate text embeddings for graph nodes and edges using LLMs, enriching your graph with the results, and then you can use vector search to retrieve from your graph in the semantic space.
With this, Google Cloud has evolved Spanner from not only being the most available, globally consistent and scalable database, to a multi-model database with intelligent capabilities that seamlessly interoperate to enable you to deliver a new class of AI-enabled applications.
Spanner Graph opens up a realm of possibilities for customers including:
- Product recommendations: Spanner Graph models the complex relationships between users, products, and preferences to build a knowledge graph rich with context. Combining fast graph traversal with full-text search, you can make product recommendations based on user queries, purchase history, and preferences, as well as similarities to other users.
- Financial fraud detection: Spanner Graph’s natural representation of financial entities like accounts, transactions, and individuals makes it easier to identify suspicious connections. Vector search reveals similar patterns and anomalies in the embedding space. By combining these technologies, financial institutions can quickly and accurately identify potential threats, minimizing financial losses.
- Social networks: Spanner Graph intuitively models individuals, groups, interests, and interactions even in the largest social networks. It enables efficient discovery of patterns such as mutual friends, shared interests, or overlapping group memberships for personalized recommendations. The integrated full-text search lets users use natural language queries to easily find people, groups, posts, or specific topics.
- Gaming: Game worlds can be naturally represented as entities like players, characters, items, and locations, and the relationships between them. Spanner Graph enables efficient traversal of connections, which is essential for game mechanics like pathfinding, inventory management, and social interactions. Additionally, Spanner Graph’s scalability and global consistency guarantees a seamless and equitable experience for all players, even during peak usage.
- Network security: Understanding the interdependencies between devices, users, and events across time is essential for identifying patterns and anomalies. With Spanner Graph relational and graph interoperability, security professionals can use graph capabilities to trace the origins of attacks, assess the impact of security breaches, and correlate these findings with temporal trends for proactive threat detection and mitigation.
- GraphRAG: Spanner Graph takes Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to the next level by grounding foundation models with a knowledge graph. In addition, the fusion of graph and tabular data in Spanner Graph enriches your AI applications with contextual information beyond what either format could represent alone. With unmatched scalability, it can accommodate even the largest knowledge graphs. Built-in vector search and Vertex AI integration streamline your GenAI workflows.
Keyword search and semantic search are also important building blocks for AI apps. Today, we’re announcing full-text search and vector search in Spanner. The new full-text search feature builds on Google’s decades of expertise in search and delivers highly scalable advanced full-text search.
Spanner’s new approximate nearest neighbor vector search is based on Google’s innovative ScaNN algorithm, which we first brought to AlloyDB and now Spanner. With it, you can now index and search vector embeddings to power AI-driven semantic search. With Spanner Graph, full-text search and vector search, we have evolved Spanner from not only being the most available, globally consistent and scalable database, to a multi-model database with intelligent capabilities that seamlessly interoperate to enable you to deliver a new class of AI-enabled applications.
With dual-region configurations in Spanner launched two weeks ago, customers can take advantage of Spanner’s industry-leading 99.999% availability while complying with data residency requirements in Australia, Germany, India, and Japan. Spanner’s geo-partitioning enables you to retain the manageability of your single, global database while optimizing your costs and improving latency for your users who are distributed around the globe.
To choose the Spanner capabilities that best meets their needs and budget, Google Cloud is also launching Spanner editions – available in Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus editions. This new pricing model will improve transparency by moving to a per server billing model and decoupling compute and network replication costs.
Introducing Gemini data agents for enhanced productivity
To help customers accelerate their multimodal, multi-engine, and multicloud data-to-AI journey, Google Cloud is also infusing gen AI capabilities into its data cloud offering and maturing its gen AI capabilities to general availability.
Gemini in BigQuery now GA
Gemini in BigQuery delivers AI-powered experiences such as data preparation, exploration and analysis, governance and security throughout the data journey, as well as intelligent recommendations to enhance user productivity and optimize costs.
We are now maturing the capabilities announced in Preview at Next’ 24, with Gemini in BigQuery features now moving to general availability, including code assistance for SQL and Python, data canvas, as well as partitioning and clustering recommendations.
Gemini in Looker now in Preview
With Gemini in Looker capabilities such as formula assist and slide generation , now available in preview, information workers can chat with their data. Now you can create calculated fields on-the-fly without having to remember complicated formulas. Automatic slide generation creates impactful presentations with insightful text summaries of your data.