What type of constraints does GAE place around application scalability?
Matthew: Generally speaking, the sky’s the limit in terms of scaling capabilities on the GAE platform. There is a usage ceiling for free accounts, and above those resource limits, the account holder has a dashboard to set thresholds for pay-per-use services that are billed to a credit card. The pricing is competitive with any other high-quality application hosting provider. DZone: How does Bigtable technology differ from the traditional RDBMS approach? Matthew: This is one of Google’s greatest innovations, but also most noticeable deviations from the technology stack that many developers have become familiar with over the last few years. Datastore, which is a more developer-friendly form of the Bigtable technology, does away with traditional table-to-table relations. No RDBMS-like relational integrity enforcement exists at the data storage level. The data model is also typically more de-normalized than that of a traditional RDBMS application, with some data duplication actually being a
