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Status Future consideration
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 28, 2025

Request to develop "Apply for Spanner" with GCP Spanner as CDC target

Our cloud applications use GCP Spanner as DB that support Strong-ACID compliance writes with TrueTime ordering. Hence requesting IBM to develop "Apply for Spanner" which can build on "Apply for BigQuery" already developed by IBM. It will also be good if IBM can provide the ability to read from the sources and write to Spanner DB in two manners:

1. Mimic the source DML operations (Insert, Update, Delete) in the target as-is to keep both source and target always in sync in near real-time

2. Append only inserts in the target in the order it occurred in the source (ie., similar to the way Kafka log works). This can help build outbox kind of pattern (Ref: outbox pattern)

Needed By Quarter
  • Admin
    Davendra Paltoo
    Jan 23, 2026

    Thanks for filing this requirement.

    At this point, we will not be prioritizing this requirement but will keep an eye on more customer demand for support for GCP Spanner as a target to help us prioritize in the future.

    In the meantime, as a possible interim solution, we suggest evaluating if the CDC Flexrep target engine would be suitable using a BYO/third party JDBC driver model as documented here:


    https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/idr/11.4.0?topic=flexrep-supported-jdbc-drivers

    IBM officially supports JDBC drivers that have been tested and documented by IBM for use with IBM CDC FlexRep. IBM CDC FlexRep can also be configured to use third-party JDBC drivers. However, if problems arise when using third-party JDBC drivers, customers may contact IBM technical support to request assistance. For such cases, IBM Support will help isolate and diagnose issues by following normal support processes. Customers might need to provide information for problem determination, but IBM will retain sole discretion to determine if an issue is third party related. If the issue is determined to be related to a third-party JDBC driver, customers can then share the diagnosis with the provider of the third-party JDBC driver for their usage in changing their driver. IBM will not be obligated to make product changes in order to make IBM CDC FlexRep compatible with any third-party JDBC driver.