I'd like to give my partners the results of simple COUNT(*) ... GROUP BY items.color type queries and perhaps joins over items and orders or some such. I'd like query response time to be sub-second (on the order of a second, at worst), and scale to billions of rows counted.
My current approach is to either backup my GCDatastore data and load it into BigQuery and provide daily analytics or use GCDataflow to maintain a set of pre-defined counters.
Is this something Spanner has as a use-case for, if I transition my backend from Datastore to Spanner?
Today, running counting queries in Cloud Spanner requires a full table scan. Depending on the size of the table this could take more than a second.
One thing you could do is to track the count in a separate table, and whenever you update the items table, update the count in the same transaction.