Google adds SQL Server support in Compute Engine, speeds up Cloud Storage Nearline performance

Google today is pulling the beta label off of three of its cloud-based data storage services: the second-generation Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, and Cloud Datastore.

But Google is also announcing speed-ups for another cloud storage service, Google Cloud Storage Nearline, which is geared toward use cases like backup and disaster recovery. Google introduced Nearline almost a year and a half ago.

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“Prior to today, retrieving data from Nearline incurred 3 to 5 seconds of latency per object. We’ve been continuously improving Nearline performance, and now it enables access times and throughput similar to Standard class objects,” Dominic Preuss, lead product manager for storage and databases at Google, wrote in a blog post.

But not only that. The Google cloud is also enhancing support for the Microsoft server stack. Almost two years after Google made it possible to run Windows Server virtualization software on top of the Google Compute Engine cloud infrastructure, Microsoft is letting developers use the SQL Server database software on Compute Engine.

That’s important because Google badly wants to make its cloud infrastructure more appealing than other options, particularly market-leading Amazon Web Services (AWS), but also Microsoft Azure. The SQL database is no stranger to Microsoft, which first announced a cloud-based version of SQL Server — under the name SQL Server Data Services — back in 2008. AWS, meanwhile, lets customers run SQL Server on top of the Relational Database Service (RDS), and it announced SQL Server support in its Database Migration Service last month.

“The unique strengths of Google Compute Engine make it the best environment to run Microsoft SQL Server featuring images with built-in licenses (in beta), as well as the ability to bring your existing application licenses,” Preuss wrote. “Stay tuned for a post covering the details of running SQL Server and other key Windows workloads on Google Cloud Platform.”