Programming Google App Engine, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Datastore Administration

Your data is the heart of your application, so you’ll want to take good care of it. You’ll want to watch it, and understand how it grows and how it affects your app’s behavior. You’ll want to help it evolve as your app’s functionality changes. You’ll probably want to make periodic backups, because nothing is perfect. You may even want up-to-date information about data types and sizes. And you’ll want to poke at it, and prod it into shape using tools not necessarily built into your app.

App Engine provides a variety of administrative tools for learning about, testing, protecting, and fixing your datastore data. In this chapter, we look at a few of these tools, and their associated best practices.

Inspecting the Datastore

The first thing you might want to do with your app’s datastore is see what’s in it. Your app provides a natural barrier between you and how your data is stored physically in the datastore, so many data troubleshooting sessions start with pulling back the covers and seeing what’s there.

The Datastore Viewer panel of the Administration Console (shown in Figure 8-1) is your main view of individual datastore entities. You can browse entities by kind, and you can perform queries using GQL by expanding the Options in the Query tab.

Figure 8-1. The Datastore Viewer panel of the Administration Console

The GQL query you type into the datastore ...