Google Spanner's Protobuf Integration: A Pleasant Surprise

One of the most pleasant surprises was discovering how well Google Spanner integrates with Protobuf. Unlike other databases where you'd serialize protos to bytes and lose all query capabilities, Spanner has native support for Protobuf columns. You can define them directly in your schema by using special PROTO type, and Spanner will understand the sub structure of your protobuf column. Here is an…