Today, we announced the preview of Spanner Omni , a downloadable version of Spanner, that expands its industry-leading distributed database capabilities beyond Google Cloud. This enables enterprises to run Spanner in their own data centers, across clouds, or on a laptop — bringing its virtually unlimited scalability, high availability, strong consistency, enterprise-grade security, and multi-model capabilities to AI-enabled applications wherever they operate.  Why Spanner Omni is a big deal Over a decade ago, Google pioneered the distributed SQL market with Spanner. It offered the "holy grail" combination: the horizontal scalability of NoSQL with the ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) compliance and strong consistency of a traditional relational database. Since then, Spanner has evolved into an interoperable multimodal database, incorporating SQL, graph, key-value, full-text search, vector search, and analytical processing with columnar engine.…