Looks like Google is feeling the pressure to keep up w/ Amazon's hosted MySQL service (<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/rds/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/rds/</a>). And they aren't fooling around considering the announcement was made by Wesley Chun (didn't realize he was a Googler, but he's the author of the excellent "Core Python" books) and Guido himself. Hurrah for competition!
This was announced at Google I/O. But it's only for AppEngine for Business at the moment.<p>Talking to some Google people they didn't rule out making available for standard AppEngine.<p>One interesting thing about it is that it's built on a custom BigTable backend (or at least Google <i>has</i> a custom BigTable backend - it's my assumption that it's being used for this)
I wish they provided an option for the datastore to be even less of an RDBMS, but much faster. I suspect a lot of the current write latency is due to the transactional guarantees they provide. Just give us access to the raw bigtable, please! :)
From the links the App Engine team provided, it looks like this is only available for customers of Google App Engine for Business ($8/user/month).<p><a href="http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-app-engine-for.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-app...</a><p>I wonder how they're doing this and how their offering will compare to Big Table in terms of ACID and scalability.