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Cloud Spanner, a horizontally scalable relational database, recently launched a point-in-time recovery (PITR) capability that provides complete data protection against inadvertent data deletion or updates due to a user error. Spanner already provides Backup and Restore and Import/Export, which recover the database to the last state when the backup or the export was taken. With PITR capability, Spanner now offers continuous data protection with the ability to recover your past data to a microsecond granularity. This helps enterprises quickly fix data corruption to reduce risk and loss of business, and minimize impact on customer experience.
PITR is simple and flexible to use and provides data protection with greater control and granularity. All you need to do is configure a database’s version retention period to retain all versions of data and schema, from a minimum of one hour up to a maximum of seven days. Spanner will take care of the rest. In the case of logical data corruption, depending on the situation, you have the choice of recovering the complete database or just restoring specific portions of the database–saving you precious time and resources, as you don’t have to restore the whole database.
Let’s take two common real-life examples: first, John, a database administrator at a multinational financial company, accidentally deletes a live table in production and figures out the mistake based on customer complaints after a day. Second, Kim, a site reliability engineer at a national online retailer, rolls out a new payment processing engine that corrupts their consumer payments database while trying to perform multiple schema changes. If the version retention period in Spanner’s PITR capability is configured correctly, it can save the day for both John and Kim. John can perform a stale read specifying a query condition and timestamp in the past, then write the results back into the live database to recover the table. Kim can use the backup or export capability by specifying a timestamp in the past to back up or export the entire database, respectively, and then restore or import it to a new database.
Setting up and recovering an entire database with PITR
The version retention period is at the database level, hence we first need to go to the desired Database Details page to set a new retention period. By default, it’s been set to one hour for every database created. Now, with the PITR feature, we can set this period up to seven days with minute/hour/day granularity.
The figure below shows how to set a database’s retention period in the UI console:
