Are there any cloud hosting solutions for geospatial data? I am currently writing a directory style app where businesses can sign up and then users can find nearby ones.
I am considering Google App Engine for this, but from what I can tell the GeoModel code is quite expensive (up to tens of thousands of dollars a year) to run since Google updated the pricing of App Engine. It doesn't seem like App Engine's database is really suited to this kind of query (though the SQL solution may be an answer).
I was hoping to find a service where I could send off a HTTP request to add data (a business' id, name and icon url) to a database, and then another one to find a list of businesses that are nearby to a given point. A service is preferable as this is work done for a client and we would like the solution to be managed with as little interaction from us or the client needed as possible.
EDIT:
I just found cartodb.com which uses PostgreSQL and is reasonably priced. Are the any other alternatives?
The App Engine Search API (currently in Experimental) supports GeoPoints and geosearch, and is great for exactly the kind of query that you describe.
See the Google Developers Academy (GDA) App Engine Search API classes for a bit more info and an example as well.
http://www.iriscouch.com/ is a cloud-based host for CouchDB and they support the geocouch extensions for CouchDB to store geoJSON data and perform spatial queries.
We have decided to go with cartodb.com because it looks like they have a good price to ease of use ratio.
You mentioned going with CartoDB, which is a good choice with a nice UI.
Just adding, if you were just looking for a scalable backend, you could use StormDB. It is a cloud hosted SQL database with geospatial extensions. You data is automatically distributed amongst multiple nodes for write, read, and parallel query scalability.
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I would need to automate the creation of new App Engine projects. Is this possible? I see there is a Google Cloud SQL Admin API which can create new Cloud SQL instances, but what about App Engine? Is there anything similar?
Update:
We have developed an application that runs on GAE and uses Cloud SQL and plenty of API integration with most of Google Apps. We foresee dozens, if not hundreds, of customers in a near future. All of them will be using their own Google domain and Google Apps.
While we could actually just deploy the application in our App Engine and modify the Cloud SQL tables to include the id of the customer who owns the record, we thought it would be better if we deploy an app instance and Cloud SQL for every one of them (on our own account). The main reasons coming to mind are that we can track how much every customer spends in terms of billing, and speed up the database since Cloud SQL is just a MySQL instance.
Steps for the creation would require editing a properties file in the packaged .war file, adding the certificate used to log in as a service account, and probably something that I am missing at this moment :-P
This question is somehow related Create an App Engine Project ID command line
As far as I know this is not possible (and is unlikely to be possible anytime soon).
Update:
I can see why splitting into separate projects for billing purposes would be really nice (multi-tenancy is great, but getting one bill per customer from Google sounds easier), but unfortunately I don't think that it's going to be your best option.
For AppEngine, you may want to look into the multi-tenancy features (or in Python) and how to get stats for billing.
Keep in mind however, CloudSQL is not simply a MySQL instance. It happens to speak MySQL but is not the same as running MySQL on Compute Engine for example. I would recommend that you run some benchmarks to be sure that the "adding the customer ID to the table" idea you had won't work.
Lastly, a possibly relevant read: http://signalvnoise.com/posts/1509-mr-moore-gets-to-punt-on-sharding
I guess the conclusion is that there’s no use in preempting the technological progress of tomorrow. Machines will get faster and cheaper all the time, but you’ll still only have the same limited programming resources that you had yesterday.
If you can spend them on adding stuff that users care about instead of prematurely optimizing for the future, you stand a better chance of being in business when that tomorrow finally rolls around.
I'm looking forward to create a mobile app with a remote database. I've already tried SQL server and PARSE. I haven't really used these that long to know any significant difference since I used them for experimentation. I see a lot of advertisements on BaaS and surely it's faster to develop on. I'd like to ask if there's really a very big difference in the long term when using SQL server or using something like PARSE. And one last thing, are there any things that one has and the other doesn't or what can or cannot do? Thank you very much.
Baas offers you a complete box of tools and you do not have to bother with renting a server, adminstrating it and fighting with scalability. You can just focus on developing an app and design you backend without touching the keyboard (if you want).
A great alternative to parse or others the german backend as a service provider apiOmat; they offer a lot of features and pretty cool generated SDKs. And, in contrast to many others, data is not hosted by NSA but in germany.
I think only difference between a SQL Server and something like Parse is one is a relational database and the other runs on non-relational databases like MongoDB. BaaS offers you a ton of other features like Authentication, Custom Code and more which speeds up your development by a huge factor and does-not have you to write your own backend server.
One of the good players in the market, I think is Parse (Gives you all the features of MongoDB) / Kinvey (they're expensive and for an enterprise) / CloudBoost.io (Gives you features of MongoDB + Search + Real-time notifications). It depends on your requirements which one to pick.
I am developing a project on my Final year at uni and this will be an Android application.
Basically, the "company" updates the database with jobs to be done around the country. Its field workers will use the app to display the jobs available in their location. Workers then select the jobs they are committing to do and send the selection back to database.
I would like to use Google App Engine for that and I am just studying it at the moment.
I came across two methods how to store the data on GAE: Datastore and Cloud SQL.
Personally, I would like to use NoSql Datastore in order to experiment and learn it.
What would you suggest me to use for my use case?
What are the pros and cons of using both mentioned methods?
If I go with Google Datastore, is this guide good for me to start with? https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/datastore/
I would say both will work. If you want to discover the Google Datastore then go for it.
But I would suggest you have a look at Objectify, this library is excellent to make you the things easier with this technology.
go with Google App engine Database. its very efficient to use. yes tat document is enough to start.
I am building an application that is an enterprise management system using gae. I have built several applications using gae and the datastore, but never one that will require a high volume of users entering transactions along with the need for administrative and management reporting. My biggest fear is that when I need to create cross-tab and other detailed reports (or business intelligence reporting and data manipulation) I will be facing a mountain of problems with gae's datastore querying and data pull limits. Is it really just architectural preference or are there quantitative concerns here?
In the past I have built systems using C++/c#/Java against an Oracle/MySql/MSSql (with a caching layer sprinkled in for some added performance on complex or frequently accessed db results).
I keep reading that we are to throw away the old mentality of relational data and move to the new world of the big McHashTable in the sky... but new isnt always better... Any insight or experience on the above would be helpful.
From the Cloud SQL FAQ:
Should I use Google Cloud SQL or the App Engine Datastore?
This depends on the requirements of the application. Datastore provides NoSQL key-value > storage that is highly scalable, but does not support the complex queries offered by a SQL database. Cloud SQL supports complex queries and ACID transactions, but this means the database acts as a ‘fixed pipe’ and performance is less scalable. Many applications use both types of storage.
If you need a lot of writes (~XXX per/s) to db entity w/ distributed keys, that's where the Google App Engine datastore really shine.
If you need support for complex and random user crafted queries, that's where Google Cloud SQL is more convenient.
What is scare me more in GAE datastore is index number limitation. For example if you need search by some field or sorting - you need +1 index. Totally you can have 200 indexes. If you have entity with 10 searchable fields and you can sort by any field - there will be about 100 combunations. So you need 100 indexes. I have developed few small projects for gae - and this is success stories. But when big one come - this is not for gae.
About cache - you can do it with gae, but they distributed cache works very slow. I prefer to create private single instance of permanent backend with RESTfull API that holds cached values in memory. Frontend instances call this API to get/set values.
Maybe it is posible to build complex system with gae, but this will be a set of small applications/services.
I want to use the Google App Engine to store my data and then query/display/ edit it using Google Spreadsheets as the user interface, with multiple concurrent users having their own view of the data. The problem I have now is that if I put everyone's data on the same Google Spreadsheet that everyone accesses, we can't each do sorting / filtering at the same time.
Is there a way to do this, and is it a good idea to build a simple system this way? I'll eventually need to query a series of Google Word Processor documents as well.
Can someone point me in the right direction on this or suggest other options?
I would ask what the advantage of doing something like this is as opposed to say hosting your application on Google App Engine and building a javascript front end with grids to help sort/filter and view data.
Anyway to answer your questions, you can build your interface over Google Spreadsheets using Google App Scripts. This will allow you to do things like authenticate your user, query, update and display data. If you want to merely display data it turns out that Google Spreadsheets has some built-in functions to do that.
Regarding consistency you should read up on GAE's Datastore as well as its features like transactions. The datastore is not an RDBMS, but is an object database which stores objects against keys. Again something to consider if you are planning to do a lot of data analysis and computation (summations, aggregations).
Overall I would recommend doing a rough design of your system without fixing on particular technologies (like GAE, and Google Spreadsheets). Once you identify what your key goals are for your application, then you can figure out which technologies and resources would make the most sense within your budget.