Database Reference
In-Depth Information
however, is unstructured storage. That is, it can be used to store any
data—from backups of your photos to websites to gene sequences. Google
Cloud Storage is directly API-compatible with the Amazon S3 storage
service, but it also has a number of additional features that are only available
in GCS.
GCS can also be used to get data in and out of BigQuery. If you have
data in GCS in any format that BigQuery understands (currently CSV and
newline-delimited JSON), you can import it directly into BigQuery.
Likewise, you can also export BigQuery tables to GCS. Exporting can be
useful if you want to back up your data, or you want to use it elsewhere. (For
example, you want to download it into a local database.) Several examples
in this topic use Google Cloud Storage to get data in and out of BigQuery.
AppEngine
Google AppEngine was the first piece of the Google Cloud Platform to be
released. AppEngine is a fully managed web app hosting environment; with
very little code you can build a standalone website or back end for a mobile
application. AppEngine has its own structured data storage mechanisms
such as Cloud Datastore and Cloud SQL. Many AppEngine users log data to
BigQuery for analytics and reporting. The BigQuery End-to-End application
that is a companion to this topic is an AppEngine app that stores data in
Cloud Datastore but analyzes data with BigQuery. Chapter 8, “Putting It
Together” walks through the code for this app in detail.
AppEngine is often called Platform-as-a-Service because it abstracts away
so many of the details about where the software is running. Users write their
own code, but they don't have to worry about actual hardware or operating
system infrastructure. AppEngine takes care of scaling its service, spinning
up new instances as demand increases.
Cloud Datastore
Cloud Datastore is a NoSQL data store; you can think of it as key value
storage. Although it does have some support for queries and indexes, it is
not well suited to ad-hoc queries over your data. It is, however, fast for
point lookups and indexed queries, and it scales virtually infinitely. Cloud
Datastore is backed by Google's Megastore distributed consistent storage
system.
