Google Cloud Spanner

Google Cloud Spanner is the first relational database service that is totally managed across the world. It can offer strong consistency and horizontal scalability for OLTP applications. This service lets you enjoy all the traditional advantages of a relational database. It is different from other relational database services because this one usually scales horizontally to a lot of servers for handling the pressure of substantial transactional workloads.

What is Google Cloud Spanner?

Google cloud spanner is actually a distributed relational database service. This service runs on Google Cloud and supports global online transaction processing deployments, SQL semantics, horizontal scaling & transactional consistency.

Interest in Google Cloud Spanner focuses on the cloud database's ability for providing availability as well as consistency. These are actually traits that are considered at odds with each other. Data designers create tradeoffs to emphasize both consistency and availability. We can describe the trade-off in the CAP Theorem. It remains underprinted as a casual move for availability and scalability in web and cloud systems. It also combines SQL & NoSQL traits to pursue system availability and data consistency.

Google Cloud Spanner's roots:

The first appearance of this service was as a key-value NoSQL store. But as time goes on, it has added a powerful typed schema and a SQL query processor. Google engineers have undertaken the work on the NoSQL processor core and SQL interface as part of the company's in-house F1 system to manage Google AdWords data. Google Cloud customers will be capable of accessing this in May 2017.

It is compatible with distributed SQL queries, and query re-starts in response to failures. This service uses TrueTime, a Google Cloud clock synchronization service using a mix of atomic clocks and GPS technology.

Other cloud databases:

It is an excellent alternative to cloud relational databases like Azure SQL, Amazon Aurora, IBM DB2 hosted, and Oracle Database Cloud Service. This one is also an excellent alternative to the commonly used open-source web and cloud application databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.

As it can combine NoSQL and SQL traits, you can also classify this as a NewSQL database. It can support CrateDB, NuoDB, the in-memory database management system MemSQL, CockroachDB, etc. Due to the support of NoSQL and SQL approaches, this service is included in the multi-model database category. This one is an emerging type, including databases like Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB & MarkLogic.

Google Cloud Spanner pricing:

Its pricing depends on three infrastructure components:

• Nodes 
• Storage 
• Networking

The pricing for nodes depends on hourly work and the number of nodes used within any given hour in a project. Besides, the pricing for storage is set on a per-month basis. It depends on the average data in the service's tables and secondary indexes during that month. Its pricing for network bandwidth is usually monthly based and depends on the amount used during that month.

Features:

It can store plenty of mutable structured data. Besides, it enables people to perform arbitrary queries with the help of SQL with relational data and maintain strong consistency as well as high availability for the data with synchronous replication.

Key features of Google Spanner:

• Applying transactions across rows, columns, tables, and databases within a Spanner universe is possible. 
• With the help of automatic multi-site replication and failover, you, as a client, can control the replication and data placement. 
• Replication is consistent & synchronous. 
• Reads are consistent, as well as data is versioned to permit for stale reads: clients will be able to read older versions of data. 
• This database service can support a native SQL interface to read & write data.

History:

The service was described first in 2012 for internal Google data centers. In 2017, its SQL capability was included. Later, it was documented in a SIGMOD 2017 paper. That year it started to be available as part of the Google Cloud Platform in 2017 under "Cloud Spanner."

Google Spanner Architecture:

With the help of the Paxos algorithm as a work part, it partitions data across up to many servers. This service uses hardware-linked clock synchronization to make sure global consistency with the help of GPS clocks and atomic clocks. The brand name of the distributed cloud infrastructure of Google is TrueTime. DBMS of Google's F1 SQL is made on its top, which exchanges Google's custom MySQL variant.

Conclusion:

In this article, we have covered the details related to the Google Spanner database. Still if you have any doubt or queries, you can let us know via comments.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Is Google Spanner SQL or NoSQL?

It came first as a key-value NoSQL store.

Q. What is Google Spanner used for?

It is used to decouple computing from storage. Therefore, it becomes possible to scale processing resources separately from storage.

Q. Is Google Spanner free?

Its free trial is an addition to the $300 credits that the Google Cloud free trial provides.

How to Pull Carbon Dioxide Out of Seawater

Since the industrial age began, the concentration of CO2 has been increasing continuously in the Earth's atmosphere year-by-year.

As a result, researchers have started investing in how to extract CO2 from the air. According to most experts, extracting carbon dioxide is essential if we want to get rid of halting climate change, global warming, extreme heat events, and stronger storms. Alongside this, removing greenhouse gases is also essential from the atmosphere. People extract approx 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

But how to pull carbon dioxide out of seawater?

According to a UCLA research team, there is a process through which removing most carbon dioxide is possible from the atmosphere each year. With the help of this technology, carbon dioxide will be extracted from seawater directly rather than capturing atmosphere CO2, but why? The reason is that each unit volume of seawater holds about 150 times more CO2 than air. A team of researchers at MIT started their research on the ocean, which absorbs about 30-40% of the atmospheric gas created by human activity.

The MIT team published a report in the journal Energy and Environmental Science. According to the report, they have found a unique process through which it is now possible to extract CO2 from ocean water. Moreover, it is possible to fit the system into offshore drilling platforms or fish farms.

Net Negative Potential:

Water splitting is the current process that people use to extract carbon dioxide from ocean water. In this process, a voltage is applied via the process across a series of stacked bipolar membranes. When the procedure will be performed, it will convert bicarbonates into molecules of CO2 to break down the water. After that, these are extracted via a vacuum. You should know that to perform the procedure, expensive materials & chemicals are required. The MIT team could make a membrane-free process that can use reactive electrodes instead of costly bipolar membranes in a cyclic process.

How does the method work?

The water is acidified in the unique process, due to which the conversation of dissolved bicarbonates starts. After that, CO2 molecules are created with the help of reactive electrodes.

Then, a vacuum is used for the extraction of the molecules. It is because water is pumped to some cells with the voltage reverse. You can find the water converted into an alkaline state to release it safely into the ocean.

The acidification of oceans is reversed in the process. It was caused due to the CO2 buildup. In this case, it needs to be mentioned that for the bleaching of coral reefs, acidic oceans are responsible. It can even threaten marine species like shellfish. This process can help to alleviate the CO2 impact which is caused by human activities by rolling out the system at scale. As soon as carbon dioxide is extracted, it is required to dispose of or store the greenhouse gas without releasing it into the atmosphere.

In addition, as we know that the concentration level of carbon dioxide is more than 100% in oceans, and it is greater than that of the air, the technology can offer more effective results than current air-capture methods. Because the gas extraction is needed with the capture step that is completed as the ocean can absorb CO2 directly.

If it comes to talking about achieving any climate goal and avoiding the effects of the climate crisis, CO2 or Carbon dioxide is a big challenge. The team at MIT keeps this in mind and anticipates that they will prepare the system for trial within the next two years. Thus, it can aid the climate crisis issues.

When the direct air-capture systems are used, it is required to capture the gas first and concentrate on it before recovering it. As there is no capture step required, it indicates that volumes of material are much smaller, resulting in making the entire method easier and decreasing the footprint needed.

Conclusion:

The research process is still going on to get an alternative to the present step. Vacuum is used for the removal of the separated carbon dioxide from the water. It is essential to identify operating strategies so that the precipitation of minerals can be prevented. It is capable of fouling the electrodes in the alkalinization cell. As a result, the problem can decrease the entire efficiency of all approaches. According to Hatton, although significant progress is made on the problems, we should not report on them so early. Varanasi says that CO2 is human life's defining issue.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q What is the best way to remove CO2 from water?

If it comes to talking about an economical process of removing free carbon dioxide in water, it is called "Decarbonation" & "Degasification." It can remove this harmful gas to 99% or more than that.

Q. What process removes carbon dioxide from the ocean responses?

With the help of the ocean "solubility pump," it is possible to remove atmospheric CO2. The reason is that air can mix with as well as dissolve into the upper ocean.

Q. What eats CO2 in the ocean?

According to scientists, diatoms, a particular type of microscopic plant absorbs 10-20 billion tonnes of CO2 yearly. These plants float on the surface of the ocean. This absorbed amount equals the carbon captured by all rainforests worldwide.

Discover More Than 800 Free TV Channels with Google TV

Google recently announced that it is going to introduce a new live TV experience to browse over eight hundred free television channels across several providers in the Live tab. With the help of Google TV, you can get all these free TV channels in a single place. Google is going to add these channels to the Google TV software on the Chromecast streaming device and can choose televisions from Sony, CL, Hisense, and Philips. April 11 is the launch date of Google TV's new live TV guide part.

To differentiate the streaming operating interface from the competitors such as Roku, Apple, Amazon, Google has taken this move which is its aggregation of various existing free TV services such as Tubi, Paramount Global's Pluto TV, and Haystack News. People who are unwilling to spend their money on any streaming service can use Google's platform.

Nowadays, there are multiple ways for streaming movies and television shows. Fortunately, the number of free TV options is increasing that can offer everything like famous shows, local news, hit movies, etc. However, as several options are available, it is tough to know what is available and how to find them. Google TV is very useful in this case.

Availability of free TV channels in one place than other smart TV platforms:

Google has started integrating access to all the free channels available from Plex, Tubi, and Haystack News. In addition, it has an existing line-up of the channels available on Pluto TV. This Google TV comes with free default channels. People are capable of watching Google TV without downloading or launching any application.

It is possible to browse more than eight hundred channels & premium programming like news channels from NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX. You are capable of tuning in to channels in over ten languages like Spanish, Hindi, and Japanese. Whether it comes to watching breaking news or blockbuster movies - it offers different choices for everyone. As there, doesn't exist any fee or subscription, you just need to jump in and start watching.

Find what you're looking for with ease:

All the new free channels are available in this new TV guide that organizes them so that you can enjoy a faster browsing. If you are willing to experience a true crime show, classic TV reruns, cooking shows you like, or anything else, you can get almost everything here. Additionally, saving your "Favorites" is possible to the guide top for quick access.

Have you subscribed to a premium live TV from YouTube TV or Sling TV? Can you access over-the-air channels? If it is the case, it is possible to use the Live tab for watching them also. People can get all live channels in a single place now. All users will get a wonderful experience of new live TV on Google TV devices like Chromecast with Google TV in the United States.

Conclusion:

Google plans to come up with a new TV guide & free channels in the year 2023. According to the Alphabet unit, free channels are integrated into the "Live" tab containing content from NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX channels. In the United States, the service is launching on all Google TV devices. If there is any eligible Android TV device, it can access the new TV guide and free channels later this year.

Magic Eraser Plus More Google Photos Features Coming to Google One

Google is making its Magic Eraser tool available originally for Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 6 users. There are many photo editing tools that Google will offer for all Google One subscribers. As a result, users of the Google One plan can use the tool on the Google Photos app. These new features will be available to the Pixel mobiles before being introduced to Apple or Samsung.

People can easily find their images and organize them along with editing & sharing with the help of Google Photos. Google has added some AI-powered editing tools. This feature represents a new HDR video effect. Using these tools is possible to store your memories.

How to use Magic Eraser:

You can use the tool in several ways. Once Google's AI detects any obvious object that can be deleted, these will be outlined as suggestions. Users can delete them with a single tap of a link. In addition, users can draw a circle around an area to erase. After that, artificial intelligence deletes the area and fills this with the surrounding background.

How to be benefitted from Magic Eraser:

Remove photobombers:

Finding distractions in the background is quite frustrating if you think it is a perfect shot. With the help of this feature, you can detect distractions in your images, such as photobombers or power lines. Therefore, removing these is possible with only a few clicks. It is possible to circle or brush other things to erase anything. You only need to use the tool to disappear them. Additionally, the feature has a Camouflage, which can change object colors in the image and help to blend the color naturally with the rest of the image.

Improve Video Quality with the HDR effect:

The HDR effect helps to balance dark foregrounds and bright backgrounds on images. Therefore, soaking is possible in each detail. It allows you to increase brightness & contrast across your videos.

Excellent Collage Editor Designs:

Google is offering some updates extra to the college editor to provide more options at the time of putting collages together in Google Photos. Styles can be added by Google Photos users to a picture in the collage editor. Besides, Google One members and Pixel users will soon enjoy many new Styles. Therefore, when you make your collages, you will get more designs to choose from.

Free Shipping On Print Orders: Google One members can enjoy free shipping on orders from the print store. But this offer is available only for people in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. Custom photo books, photo prints, and canvas prints can bring memories to life. People who are not Google One members can sign up for free with a trial in Google Photos.

Conclusion:

Although every feature is not worth paying for, the combined package has become very attractive to Google One subscribers in the app stores. Google One app was the sixth non-game app based on consumer spending. According to Google, these features have been rolled out but will not reach all users globally in the upcoming weeks.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Q. Is Magic Eraser available on Google Photos?

You need a mobile to remove the unnecessary objects from the pictures using Magic Eraser without a fuss. This new feature is available in Google Photos on iOS and Android devices.

Q. Will Magic Eraser come to older pixels?

This feature starts rolling out quickly to the older Pixel mobiles and Google One. Other features of Google will soon be available broadly. Google brings image features and all of which were exclusive to recent Pixel mobiles to more devices.

Q. Is Magic Eraser coming to Google One?

Google is bringing Magic Eraser and other improved editing features. Pixel users and Google One members (on iOS & android) can enjoy the feature. The extra benefit that Google One members will get is free shipping on print orders.

Adobe Firefly

Adobe Firefly is a new family of productive artificial intelligence-based models. The primary focus of Firefly is creating pictures and text effects. Whether it is power, ease, speed or precision — everything can be brought directly into Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud and Adobe Express workflows by this model. You should know that it is a part of new Adobe Sensei productive AI services across Adobe's clouds' series.

There is a long history of AI innovation behind Adobe. It offers a lot of intelligent capabilities via Adobe sensei into apps on which millions of people rely. Now, due to the Neural filters in Photoshop, content aware fill in after effects, attribution AI in Adobe experience platform along with the liquid mode in acrobat, Adobe customers can do various tasks like creating content, editing, measuring, optimising, and reviewing content with speed, power, ease and precision. Hence, these are following the features allowing customers to do so:

Let's explore the features of Adobe firefly.

Firefly Features:

Productive AI for makers: 

The 1st model's beta version enables you to use everyday language so that you can create exceptional new content. It comes with the potential to offer an excellent performance.

Unlimited creative choices: 

This new model now features context-aware image generation, the result of which you can add any new idea to your composition that you are thinking.

Instant productive building blocks: 

Have you ever imagined generating brushes, custom vectors, and textures from a sketch? You will be glad to know that it is possible now. You can edit your creativity with the help of tools you are familiar with.

Astound video edits: 

The model allows you to change the atmosphere, mood or weather. This model's exceptional quality of text-based video editing lets you describe the look you want. Thus, changing colours & settings is possible to match.

Distinctive content creation for everyone: 

With this model, you can make unique posters, banners, social posts, etc., using an easy text prompt. Besides, you can upload a mood board for making original, customizable content.

Future-forward 3D: 

In future, it is expected that Adobe will allow Firefly to get involved in fantastic works with 3D. For instance, you can turn simple 3D compositions into photorealistic pictures and make new 3D object variations & styles.

Creators get the priority: 

Adobe is committed to responsibly developing creative, generative AI with creators at the center. Adobe's target is to offer the creators every benefit creatively and practically. The more Firefly evolves, Adobe will work continuously with the creative community to support technology so that it can improve the creative procedure.

Enhance the creative procedure: 

The model mainly wants to help users so that they can expand upon their natural creativity. Firefly is an embedded model inside Adobe products. That's why it might provide productive artificial intelligence based tools which people can use for workflows, use cases, and creative needs.

Practical benefits to the makers: 

As soon as the model is out of its beta stage, makers can use content produced in the model commercially. When the model evolves even more, Adobe is expected to provide several Firefly models to the makers for various uses.

Set the standard for responsibility: 

CAI, or Content Authenticity Initiative, was set up by Adobe to create a global standard for trusted digital content attribution. Adobe uses the CAI's open-source tools to push for open industry standards. These free tools are developed actively via the nonprofit Coalition for C2PA or Content Provenance and Authenticity. Adobe is also working toward a universal "Do Not Train" Content Credentials tag which will remain connected to the content wherever it is used, published or stored.

New superpowers to the creators: 

This model gives superpowers to the creators. Therefore, they work at an imaginative speed. If you create content, the model enables you to use your words to make content how you want. So, you can make different content like images, audio, vectors, videos, 3D, and creative ingredients, including brushes, colour gradients and video transformations.

It allows users to generate uncountable different content to make changes repeatedly. Firefly will be integrated directly by Adobe into the industry-leading tools & services. As a result, you can leverage the power of productive artificial intelligence within your workflows.

Recently, a beta was launched by Adobe for this model displaying how skilled & experienced makers can create fantastic text effects and top-quality pictures. According to Adobe, the technology's power can't be understood without the imagination to fuel it. Here, we are going to mention the names of the applications which will get benefitted from Adobe Firely integration: Adobe Express, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

Provide Assistance to creators to work more efficiently: 

According to a recent study from Adobe, 88% of brands said that the demand for content has doubled at least over the previous year, whereas two-thirds of people expect that it will grow five times over the next two years. Adobe is leveraging generative AI to ease this burdenwith solutions for working faster, smarter and with greater convenience – including the ability for customers to train Adobe Firefly with their collateral, generating content in their personal style or brand language.

Compensate makers: 

Like Adobe has previously done with Behance & Adobe Stock, the company's goal is to make productive AI so that customers can monetize their talents. A compensation model is developing for Adobe Stock contributors. As soon as the model will be out of beta, they will share details.

Firefly ecosystem: 

The model is expected to be available through APIs on different platforms letting customers integrate into custom workflows & automation.

Conclusion:

Adobe's new model empowers skilled customers to produce top-quality pictures & excellent text effects. Besides, the above-mentioned "Do Not Train" tag is especially for the makers who are unwilling to use their content in model training. The company plans to allow users to extend the model's training with the creative collateral.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How do you get Adobe Firefly?

You can get this as a standalone beta at firefly.adobe.com. The service intends to get feedback. Customers can request access to the beta to play with it.

Q. What is generative AI?

It is a kind of AI that translates ordinary words and other inputs into unique results.

Q. Where does Firefly get its data from?

This model gets training on a dataset of Adobe Stock, openly licensed work as well as public domain content where the copyright is expired.