This foundational course introduces learners to Google Cloud Spanner, the fully managed, mission-critical relational database. Designed primarily for application developers, cloud architects, and database administrators, this course covers the core tenets of Spanner: global consistency, relational schema design, and horizontal scalability. The curriculum is enriched with modern operational context, exploring how Spanner editions optimize costs, how the PostgreSQL interface broadens ecosystem compatibility, and how multi-model capabilities eliminate the need for complex data silos.