Is there any way to do local development with cloud spanner? I've taken a look through the docs and the CLI tool and there doesn't seem to be anything there. Alternatively, can someone suggest a SQL database that behaves similarly for reads (not sure what to do about writes)?
EDIT: To clarify, I'm looking for a database which speaks the same flavour of SQL as Cloud Spanner so I can do development locally. The exact performance characteristics are not as important as the API and consistency behaviour. I don't think Cockroach meets these requirements?
There is now an emulator offered from Google for local development. As of 5/2020, it's in beta.
https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/emulator
It only stores data in memory, but you may be able to use the gcloud command line to backup and restore your development data to and from disk as needed.