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 [...]

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 [...]