You can. This is for Google's fully managed SQL service, "fully managed" meaning that you don't have to directly manage Docker instances or VMs yourself.
But you do have to specify CPU and memory and pay for those for having the database running - even if you're not calling it.
What I'd like is to pay for what I use when calls are being made. Providing an SQL interface as a service, rather than actually running a whole personally copy of a database.
Yup, except that's got a cold start time of 25 seconds. So no use for a low usage system. (One, for instance, that gets used a couple of times a day, but really needs to be available when it is.)
Near zero. If my data is only a few kB then an already running process should be able to read it from disk and read/write the data almost instantly.
They should be working on a version of MySQL that can do this without spawning a whole new running instance on a whole new server.
What I'd like is to pay for what I use when calls are being made. Providing an SQL interface as a service, rather than actually running a whole personally copy of a database.