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Comment by URSpider94 | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of re-hashing a number of previous discussions, GQL appears limited when compared to SQL because Google's database is designed to scale to extremely large datasets and massive numbers of concurrent users. The features that are missing were removed intentionally because they don't scale. If you can re-think your database use to be consistent with this new paradigm, then you'll have a much more scaleable app when you're done.

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The end goal for every app doesn't have to be scaling on the order that GAE's original design provides. People have lived for years creating apps that use Excel or Access as a datastore.

Being able to use SQL on GAE will allow more widespread use of GAE for things besides "the next twitter".

The flip-side is that anyone who needs to do reporting, aggregation, etc. is going to spend a lot of time reinventing stock behaviour while their competitors focus on building new features. Those competitors are more likely to get to the point where they have the relative luxury of deciding how to handle large numbers of users because they actually have them.

If the first user waits 2 seconds per response and the millionth user waits 2 seconds per response, that does indeed meet one definition of scaling. The problem is you aren’t going to find a million users willing to wait that long. So why punish the first user?

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