Google today released Google App Engine SDK 1.1.6 (announcement, download) which, among other things, brings with it datastore keys that you can sort and filter on. What this means is that you can now do batch operations on data. So it's time for me to go back to my Google App Engine backup solution, which broke [...]

I've been working a lot with Google App Engine in the past few months. I still maintain, as I reiterated recently in my Boagworld interview with Paul, that it's a great idea and has great potential. And the Google App Engine team has been wonderful in working with me and helping me out. Unfortunately, there [...]

Backing up and restoring the datastore in your local SDK can be very useful for several use cases. Personally, I find that I alternate between running the local SDK with a restore of data from the deployment environment and with an empty or test datastore. The local SDK slows down painfully when you populate it with [...]

This is a quick screencast to show you the data export solution I've created for Google App Engine that lets you backup your application's datastore and restore it either locally on your development machine or on the same Google App Engine application on the deployment environment or on a different Google App Engine [...]

Google App Engine, we need to have a talk about your datastore keys. Your keys can have names but they cannot start with a number. Keys can also have IDs, which are numeric. We can read those, but can't set them. When I put an entity into the datastore for the first time, you assign it [...]