

Google puts MySQL in App Engine Cloud with Google Cloud SQL - benjaminfox
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/google-puts-mysql-in-app-engine-cloud.ars

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Corrado
This looks interesting, however I have several reservations about this. First
and formost is the pricing issue. In the recent past Google has not been very
smart about pricing it's cloud offering and the Google Cloud SQL appears to be
making a similar mistake.

The official announcement says that it's free for now but if/when they change
that you will be notified in advance. I know that sounds good but to me it
screams vendor lock-in. My thought is that 6 months from now Google will want
$6 / second or something ridiculous and I'll be scrambling to move platforms.

The other thing is it raises the spectre of the future of MySQL in Oracles
hands. Who knows how much longer MySQL will be viable?

Both pieces of information make me feel like I would be building a system on a
pile of sand that can be swept away in an instant. That's not a comfortable
feeling...

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cmelbye
Wait, what would you suggest they do instead of announcing the pricing 30 days
in advance? That seems completely reasonable to me... Also, considering
several huge sites still use MySQL like Facebook, Wikipedia, etc, I think
you'll be fine in that respect for the foreseeable future.

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throw_away
Why not determine pricing before they launched into beta or at least provide
guidance numbers? The problem with the 30 day warning in pricing is that the
exact same thing that happened with gae pricing could happen here: someone
builds a project with a certain price range in mind, pricing is announced and
is far higher than expected for this use case, developer has 30 days to
scramble to migrate their app and write angry blog posts.

Starting out as free is a mistake in my mind, because it doesn't properly set
developer expectations from the start about what those price levels will be or
even what metrics the price will be based upon. I would bet that no matter
what they do, there will be some people who will be upset when pricing is
finally announced.

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cmelbye
Well, I think for precisely those reasons, people will know not to form their
own pricing expectations in their mind this time.

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adrianscott
This is a huge step forward, can't wait to dive into this for CoderBuddy.

I do agree with others though that there should be more than 30 days notice on
pricing. And it would be nice to have some guidance on pricing, given recent
history...

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alvivar
Why MySQL over PostgreSQL? I would like to know how they choose one over the
other...

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axiak
I don't know their official reason, but they seem to have a lot of in-house
knowledge of mysql internals [1].

1: <http://code.google.com/p/google-mysql-tools/>

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bane
We're very very interested in this, but given the previous bait and switch on
pricing, we're not going to touch it with a 10 foot pole until the pricing is
set.

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waelchatila
from working with gae excessively over a year now, gae is not really reliable
enough for mission critical systems. Datastore queries that work one day,
might not work the next, random exceptions using the gae api is common.

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nvictor
so we can sql with our sql while we sql?

