What is the difference between backing up my entities to the Google Blob store versus to Google Cloud Storage? There does not seem to have much explanation on the differences.
Honestly, now that they both have the same basic quota and paid limitations, I don't think there is much of a difference between both. It's going to be mostly how you access/do calls on both.
For the blobstore, there is a nifty API (in Python or in Java)
For Google Cloud Storage, you need to get the client library and add it to your project before using it (again, in Python or in Java)
At this point, it mostly has to do with my own experience, but if all you do is store files and retrieve them, I prefer the blobstore API to the GCS client library (easier to use, I find).
In terms of cost.... the GCS will be cheaper (they both provide the same free size, and the same price per storage, but blobstore charges more for calls).
I do believe that in the backend they are VERY similar, so the difference is mostly in how you pay for them/what you need to setup to
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I would like my server that runs on Google App Engine to host large files such as audio scripts and images, is it possible to store them as a column in a database? If not, what mechanisms may I use?
You have two options:
Blobstore (currently available in Java, Python and Go).
Google Cloud Storage (currently available in Java, Python and PHP).
Blobstore and GCS are most likely what your are looking for.
Both services are not covered by the GAE SLAs however. If you need that kind of reliability promise you're stuck with the GAE datastore.
You can put your files in a BLOB property of a datastore entity and serve it from there. Datastore entities have a size limit of 1MB however.
To circumvent that, you must split and re-assemble your files using multiple entities. There again is a size limit to any GAE response which is 32MB.
I need to store images and I have 2 options:
store the image into GAE datastore.
store the image somewhere (maybe also on Dropbox or another website) and store its link into GAE datastore.
What's the best practice when we need to store an image into DB, in the hypotesis that each image is bijectivelly linked to a specific element of the datastore?
I think it depends heavily on the use case.
I have a small company website running on appengine and the content images are all stored in the datastore and for that application it works well (they are all relatively small images).
If you have a high traffic site you may find storing them in GCS, or some other mechanism that supports a more cost effective CDN will be more appropriate.
If the images are large (more than 1MB) then the datastore isn't a practical solution.
There will be no hard and fast rule. Understand your use cases, your cost structure, how complex the solution will be to manage, and then choose the most appropriate solution.
Neither of the above. Google's cloud platform includes a service specifically for storing files, Google Cloud Storage, which is well integrated into GAE. You should use that.
I've been reading more about Google AppEngine and learned python in the past couple of weeks, including working with MongoDB. What I need the most is a scalable database solution. Before discovering Google AppEngine, the only three DB solutions I find useful are DynamoDB, MongoDb and BigCouch.
I find out how that I really like python language, and for one coming from ASP.NET development, I've decided to switch and develop my app using python. My first choice was to develop my application using python + bottle + mongoDB. The problem is that DynamoDB is very expensive, and the lack of easy to use backup/restore options made me pass Amazon's offering.
Google AppEngine datastore is much more affordable. However, I still can't find information regarding some specific question on Google's website
Here are some of the questions I need answer to:
Does Google Datastore support backup/restore within the administration console?
If I want to backup/restore 50TB of data, how much time it takes to backup/restore the data? Where it is stored? what are the costs?
How much time it takes to backup 1TB of data for example?
Does DataStore support caching in the database layer
Any cons that I should be aware of?
Those some of the question that I need to get answers to. MongoDB is an excellent product and developing web app using Mongo + Python + bottle is fun fun fun. However, I prefer a full DB hosted solution like one offered by Google. But before I do that, I need to be sure that I'm not missing anything.
Here are some of the questions I need answer to:
Does Google Datastore support backup/restore within the administration
console?
No. Yes. You can back up and restore data from within the Administration Console by enabling datastore_admin for an application (Thanks to Idan Shechter for pointing this out!) More info can be found here: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/datastoreadmin
You can also download the data through the command line. See: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/uploadingdata
If I want to backup/restore 50TB of data, how much time it takes to backup/restore the data?
It depends on where you back the data up to. Backing up to the Blobstore or Google Cloud storage will probably take much less time than backing up to your local machine. Transferring 50TBs to your local machine will take a long time and depend on many factors including network speed.
Where it is stored?
If you use the Datastore Administration, you can backup to the Blobstore or to Google Cloud Storage. If you use the command line tools, it will be stored where you choose to download the data to.
what are the costs?
The Blobstore costs $0.13/GB/Month and gives you 5GB free. Google Cloud Storage is $0.12 per GB/Month up to the first TB. You can see more pricing info for Cloud Storage here:
https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/pricingandterms
Bandwidth costs are $0.12 per GB (The first GB is free). More details on pricing can be seen here:
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/
How much time it takes to backup 1TB of data for example?
Again, it depends on where you back up to and your transfer speeds.
Does DataStore support caching in the database layer Any cons that I should be aware of?
No, it does not support database layer caching.
I am writing a web application that requires a database which will have entities like user, friends etc. Since Cloud SQL service is not free so i am looking for alternatives. Amazon RDS is one option, since they have a free tier which would suit my needs in the short term but before I get into it I would like to know more about blobstores.
Is it ideal to use blobstore to store such kind of information?
There are questions like:
how will the read/write latency be compared to a traditional db ?
if i start with blobstore and later i want to move to relational db, what are the problems that i could face ?
The most important of all is, if it is ideal to use blobstore in my scenario.
After looking at the documentation on google dev site I have found that blobstores are used to store large/medium files like images and videos.
You can't and shouldn't try to use the blobstore for structured data. That's what the datastore is for. Blobstore is for unstructured data such as files.
I'm reading up on Google App engine and I'm thinking of using it as a CDN for a project I'm working on. As far as I can tell, there's two ways to store data. I could use a datastore or I could put files in a directory.
I was brought up believing it's a bad idea to store large binary data in a database, but according to Google, the datastore isn't an RMDB, it just acts like one.
So my gut is telling me to upload files to a directory. However, I thought I'd best canvas an opinion on here before making my mind up.
Has anyone used GAE for stuff like this? And if so, what method did you choose for storing files, and why?
You cannot write to the file system in App Engine. You need to use the Datastore to store any data.
Note that if your "large binary files" are actually large, you're going to run in to the 1MB limit on all API calls. An API for storing larger blobs is on the roadmap, but there's no way of knowing when it will be released. At present, you need to split blobs larger than 1MB into multiple datastore entities.
The blobstore API lets you store files upto 50 mb ,though its an experimental api and requires billing be enabled.Also its its different from bigtable.
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/blobstore/
Nowadays Google Cloud Storage is the way to go for large files.