[Chicago] Google App engine is python powered

Garrett Smith garrett at mojave-corp.com
Tue Apr 8 22:35:11 CEST 2008


I've been steering clear of RDBs for the past several months and have been working with CouchDB just to see how much I can do without SQL. As Zope aficionados will attest, life does not *have* to begin and end with relational joins.

Though I agree with Chris, there's so much history behind RDBs, it's a bit scary to consider alternatives.

Google's restricting data persistence because they need to replicate across servers in multiple locations. All of the distributed databases I've seen (Couch, Mnesia, SimpleDB) compromise consistency at some level to support distributed, non-blocking writes. If you want to avoid the availability and scale problems of a single master/slave cluster, you'll need to venture out into the wilderness of these strange data stores.

That said, Ian is fond of popping my esoteric architectural bubble by pointing out that I'll never write an app that 100 million people use anyway. Touché, goddammit.

Still, there's nothing better than that giddy high of self righteousness that only comes from embracing a particularly obscure technology.

Where's *your* CouchDB t-shirt, loser.

----- "Feihong Hsu" <hsu.feihong at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Chris,
> 
> Amazon handles relational databases just fine. You only give up SQL
> if you decide to use their SimpleDb service. Within your EC2
> instance, you can install whatever database you like.
> 
> --- Chris McAvoy <chris.mcavoy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > >  Not I.  I got an enigmatic invitation to the announcement, but
> > lacking
> > >  any context I didn't pay much attention to it.
> > 
> > Enigmatic invites are cooler than straight up invites.  Congrats on
> > the virtual backpat from the Uncle Goog.
> > 
> > >  I'm pretty stoked, though.  Python can finally take on PHP -- a
> > far more
> > >  worthy competitor than stupid Java.
> > 
> > Indeed.   It's a pretty exciting time.  I'm still not entirely sure
> > what to make of the new sql-free-stack that Amazon and Google are
> > buying into.  It makes me nervous.  LAMP, in all it's wondrous
> > forms
> > has been such a rock in my web-life for the past few years, that
> > this
> > new PARADIGM sort of makes me wet my pants.
> > 
> > If the future is schema-lite db's, cloud controllers and sandboxes,
> > I'm ok with it...but someone is going to have to hold my hand.  And
> > get me clean underpants.
> > 
> > Chris
> > _______________________________________________
> > Chicago mailing list
> > Chicago at python.org
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
> > 
> 
> 
> 
>      
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