ODBC for the Datastore?

[William Astarita]

Does anything like this exist?  I want to connect to the data store from an MS Access application while I'm transitioning over from a desktop app to a web app I'm building.

[Jim]

I don't think you're going to find anything like that for GAE Data Store; the Data Store is a NoSQL database technology, and ODBC, while technically a very flexible specification that can be adapted to address a wide range of database technologies, really evolved hand-in-hand with SQL databases.  The data store and other NoSQL databases don't support a wide range of standard SQL constructs such as JOIN's or SUM/COUNT or any other scan type of operation.  It is highly unlikely that an app originally written for a SQL-based database will work with a NoSQL database without major rework.

If you're transitioning an existing desktop app over to the cloud, I suggest you look at cloud-based RDBMS offerings such as Google's Cloud SQL offering which is based on MySQL and will offer odbc/jdbc drivers allowing you to point existing code at the cloud-based database.  Amazon Web Services also has a nice offering called Relational Data Service (RDS) which supports MySQL, Oracle and MS SQL databases in the cloud, again with traditional driver support.