Database Operations in Spanner

In this lesson, we will learn about read-write, read-only, and schema-change transactions utilizing the timestamping mechanism.

Read-write transactions

A transaction's writes are buffered on the client side until the commit. Therefore, the results of a transaction's writes are not visible to subsequent reads inside the same transaction. This architecture is particularly well-suited to Spanner since uncommitted writes do not have timestamps assigned yet, and the timestamps of any data read are returned by a read transaction.

The following slides explain the read and write transactions.