Porting Web Application (PHP/SQL) to GAE

[Thomas Valley]

My current platform is:
Windows Server 2003 / IIS
SQL Server 2005
PHP

I'm sold on the financial, stability and availability benefits of
GAE. However, I'm worried about the feasibility of porting my data
and application to the environment, mainly because my application is
financial in nature, and depends greatly on the ability to quickly
deploy reports, stored procedures, views, and the like.

The application has approximately 1000 users who, at most, visit the
website once a month. The vast majority of the users only visit it
once a year. The database is about 300MB, compressed.

Is it worth it to recreate the data structures and import the data
into GAE's data models, or would it be more reasonable to either wait
for SQL Hosting to be available from GAE (or host it on a server like
www.rdbhost.com)?

Thank you.

[Robert Kluin]

Hi Thomas,
Based on this information it is impossible to offer any suggestions.
I work extensively with financial applications using SQL Server,
which frequently implies lots of T-SQL and stored procedures, and a
variety of languages to develop front-ends for those applications
(never PHP + MS SQL, TBH).

I've found that a lot of applications can be structured to run
extremely well on App Engine's datastore. The hard part is generally
visualizing your problem in a way that fits well with the datastore.
Many of the financial applications I deal with would actually work
extremely well with the key-value model for reporting. The hard part
might be processing, but without knowing details of what you're
doing... who knows.

Some tips: a-z) do not think in terms of SQL, 1) don't be afraid to
denormalize, 2) think in terms of how you need to access your data, 3)
optimize for the common operations.

Robert

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[Noah McIlraith]

The biggest issue would likely be the database. I strongly recommend you become very familiar with how GAE's datastore works.