Without joins on Google App Engine, does your data have to exist in one big table?

Question

Since Google App Engine doesn\'t permit joins, does this mean that I have to take all of the tables in my web app and figure out a way of combining them into a single huge table

Answer 1

Just because you don't have joins implemented by the DBMS doesn't mean you can't have multiple tables. In App Engine, these are called 'entity types', and you can have as many of them as you want.

Generally, you need to denormalize your data in order to avoid the need for frequent joins. In the few situations where they're inevitable, you can use other techniques, like doing the join in user code.