The last few weeks were very exciting for users of Cloud Spanner, Google's fully managed, horizontally scalable database that offers up to 99.999% availability. We had several big announcements leading up to and at Google Cloud Next '23: breaking data silos between transactional and analytical data using Data Boost, integration with Google's always-on, generative AI collaborator Duet AI, and enabling schema authors to push down critical identity logic into the database using auto-generated keys. Let's dig deeper into each of these announcements.