Spanner now supports dual-region instance configurations in Australia, Germany, India, and Japan

## Feature Spanner now supports dual-region instance configurations in Australia, Germany, India, and Japan. Dual-region configurations let you replicate data in multiple zones across two regions in a single country. This helps you meet your data residency requirements, while taking advantage of 99.999% availability. For more information, see [Dual-region configurations](https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/instance-configurations#dual-region-configurations). ## Feature Spanner now supports the approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) distance functions (`APPROX_COSINE_DISTANCE()`, `APPROX_EUCLIDEAN_DISTANCE()`, and `APPROX_DOT_PRODUCT()`) in the GoogleSQL dialect (in Preview). If you have tables with a large amount of unstructured data that can be represented as vector data, you can create a vector index using DDL statements and accelerate similarity searches and nearest neighbor queries using standard SQL using these functions without having to copy the data into a separate system. For more information, see [Find approximate nearest neighbors to index and query vector embeddings in Spanner](https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/find-approximate-nearest-neighbors).