To handle high read demand globally, what is a highly effective database solution?

Choosing a multi-regional Cloud Spanner as a solution for handling high read demand globally is an effective strategy because Cloud Spanner is designed for high availability, scalability, and global distribution. It offers horizontal scaling, meaning that as your read demand grows, you can add more nodes to distribute the load without compromising performance.

Cloud Spanner maintains strong consistency and provides automatic sharding across multiple regions, which allows it to efficiently manage read and write operations from anywhere in the world. Its architecture is tailored for real-time applications that require low-latency access to data, which is especially important in scenarios with high read traffic spread across different geographical locations.

In contrast, other options may have limitations in terms of scalability, global availability, or consistency. For instance, deploying multiple single regional Cloud SQL instances might create data silos, reducing the ability to handle reads from various regions effectively. Using Cloud Firestore does allow for global distribution, but it may not meet the same level of transactional consistency and complex querying capabilities as Cloud Spanner. Lastly, creating a single Cloud SQL instance with read replicas might not provide the same high availability and scalability needed to support a globally distributed application with high read demands, since it still relies on a single primary instance for writes,