Ikai Lan: The Google App Engine Datastore API

With Ikai Lan another speaker confirmed speaking at Buzzwords. He is a software engineer working on the Google Developer Relations team. Prior to Google, he worked as a software developer building social applications at LinkedIn and a systems integration consultant delivering VoIP applications at Citrix Systems. Ikai is an avid technologist, consuming volumes of material about new programming languages, framework or service. In his free time, he enjoys the California outdoors, winning Chinese language karaoke contests and playing flag football. He resides in San Francisco, CA, where he watches in anguish as his favorite professional sports teams implode season after season.

Ikai is going to give a talk at Berlin Buzzwords on the topic "Google App Engine Datastore API: Building a complex query engine on top of BigTable" - Each of Google App Engine’s various services are built on top of an existing, scalable, highly available service used in production to power the majority of Google products. App Engine’s datastore is one such service, built on top of BigTable, a distributed persistence engine. At its most basic level, BigTable is nothing more than a distributed, schemaless hash table, however, App Engine provides an API for filtering on object values, ordering results and even syntax in the query language for queries against multiple properties of persisted entities. This talk will discuss how all this works. We’ll begin first with a high-level overview of BigTable, followed by a discussion about indexing and simple queries. We’ll end on a high note: a taste of how complex queries are performed and why the current limitations of the query engine exist.