Google LLC today revealed plans to strengthen the lineup of database services on its cloud platform with a managed in-memory store and several improvements to existing products.

Cloud Memorystore for Redis, the new offering, is based on the open-source Redis project. The database keeps records on a server’s memory instead of slower secondary storage as traditional systems do, which speeds response times. Firms typically use Redis to cache applications’ most frequently used data for fast access.

Google’s new cloud implementation of the project offers the same basic set of benefits as its other database services. It removes the need for companies to manage the underlying infrastructure, while providing compatibility with the open-source version of Redis to ease migrations. Google also promises to provide a 99.99 percent uptime guarantee once the service becomes available on May 9.

On top of Cloud Memorystore for Redis, the search giant this morning announced updates for two of its existing database offerings. The first is Cloud Spanner, the much-touted “globally distributed” relational store that the search giant launched last year.

The service is built to power mission-critical workloads such as inventory management applications that keep their data in rows and columns. Cloud Spanner has been augmented with support for commit timestamps, which allow services to store information about when a given record was updated. The feature is aimed at making it easier to track changes to important data for security and legal purposes.

The other database service being upgraded is Cloud Bigtable, a NoSQL store built with latency-sensitive use cases such as analytics in mind. Over the next week, Google intends to roll out a replication feature that will enable companies to copy a deployment across the data centers in a given region. Doing so can ensure that essential information and the applications that depend on it remain available even if one facility goes offline.

Lastly, Google has released its managed version of the popular open-source PostgresQL database into general availability. The launch follows a lengthy beta period that saw the search giant add high-availability features, extension support and several other capabilities.

Image: Google