GAE Entity group / data modeling for consistency and performance

Question

As a continuation of in this post, this is a bit of a capstone-style question to solidify my understanding of gae-datastore and get some critiques on my data modeling decisions.

Answer 1

I think you should reconsider how important is strong consistency for your use case. From what I can see it is not critical that all this entities have strong consistency. In my opinion, eventual consistency will work just fine. Most of the time you will see up to date data and only sometimes (read: really really rarely) you will see some stale data. Think about how critical is that you always get up to date data vs how much it penalizes your application. Entities that need strong consistency are not stored in the most efficient way in terms of number of reads per second.

Also if you look at the document Structuring Data for Strong Consistency, you will see that it mentions that you can't have more then 1 write per second when using that approach.

Also having entity groups effects data locality as per AppEngine Model Class docs.

If you also read the famous Google's doc on Google Spanner, section 2 you will see how they deal with entities which have same parent key. Essentially, they are put closer together. I assume Google might be using similar approach with AppEngine Datastore. At some point, according to this source Google might use Spanner for AppEngine Datastore in the future.

Another point, there is no cheaper of faster get then get by key. Having said this, if you can somehow avoid querying this could reduct the cost of running you application. Assuming that you're developing a web application you can store your song keys in a JSON/text object and then use Prospective Search API to get up to date results. This approach requires a bit more work and requires you to embrace eventual consistency model as the data might be slightly out of date by the time it reaches the client. Depending on your use case (this does not apply a small application and small user base obviously) the savings might out-weight the cost. When I say the cost I mean the fact that data might be slightly out of date.

In my experience, strong consistency is not a requirement for a large number of applications. The number of applications that can live with slightly stale data seems to outnumber the applications that cannot. Take YouTube for example, I don't really mind if I don't see all the videos immediately (as there's such a large number that I can't even know if I see all of them or not). When you design something like this, first ask yourself question, is it really necessary to provide up to date data or a bit stale data is good enough? Can the user even tell the difference? Up to date data is much more expensive then a little bit stale.