How Entities Are Updated

To fully understand how the datastore guarantees that your data stays consistent, it’s worth discussing how transactions are performed behind the scenes. To do so, we must mention BigTable, Google’s distributed data system that is the basis of the App Engine datastore. We won’t go into the details of how entities, entity groups, and indexes are stored in BigTable, but we will refer to BigTable’s own notion of atomic transactions in our explanation.

Figure 7-1 shows the phases of a successful transaction.

The datastore uses a “journal” to keep track of changes that need to be applied to entities in an entity group. Each journal entry has a unique timestamp that indicates the order in which the changes were made. The datastore remembers the timestamp of the most recent change that has been committed, and guarantees that attempts to read the data will see all changes up to that point.