Chapter 12. Bulk Data Operations and Remote Access

The datastore is designed for retrieving and processing data at a rate suitable for interactive web applications. A single request may need to update a few entities, or query for and retrieve several dozen. Larger amounts of work triggered by interactive actions are not typically expected to be performed within a single web request. (App Engine’s facility for such work, task queues, is discussed in Chapter 13.) User-initiated actions tend to fit into this model of short requests.

Administrative actions, such as one-off chores performed by the application’s maintainers and staff, sometimes follow a different model. You may need to create or update thousands of entities from a datafile, or download the complete contents of the datastore for archival or offline testing. A change to a data model in a new version of the software may require modifying millions of entities to match before the software can be deployed.