I too suspect that deletion is a truly expensive operation and that is directly reflected in pricing. Or worse, that the tablets remain forever fragmented and the space is never actually reused (as previously suggested on this thread).
I've often advocated for a way for me to mark an entity as "for deletion" and allow Google to come around in some kind of batch operation to clean it up. It would be ideal if it were immediately removed from indexes (i.e., from sight) and I would be willing to pay for it until the background cleanup comes around (e.g., maybe at least every X days) - as long as the wait+background-cleanup costs were some fraction of just outright deleting it. Even without the immediate index removal, we have lots of use cases where the data could actually remain indexed because our particular use case naturally avoids these orphaned rows (e.g., think of all the blog posts and comments and +1's for a deleted account). I'm sure this is pretty common. So to be able to mark all these entities as "for deletion" or "reclaimable" would let a background process clean them up for little or no cost (apart from datastore storage while holding them during the "wait" period). j On Friday, 24 May 2013 13:09:43 UTC-6, vlad wrote: > > While it might be true that data deletion is expensive. The reality is > Google is losing customers over that! It is obvious that whoever started > this thread is not going to fork over $3600 for the privilege. His only way > out right now is to cancel his credit card and abandon the account. Since I > doubt GAE will let him just stop billing on that app. This is a sad > situation and a flaw in GAE's business model. > > On Friday, May 24, 2013 11:53:59 AM UTC-7, barryhunter wrote: >> >> >> >> >> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:33 PM, John Wheeler wrote: >> >>> >>> It would be best if deletes were extremely cheap - give developers the >>> ability to do them at cost so they're not afraid to experiment on App Engine >>> >> >> What makes you think they are not close to 'cost' already? >> >> You seem to be assuming deletes are absurdly 'marked up' - for what ever >> reason. >> >> Why would Google doe that? >> >> >> Deleting at 'scale' is not cheap. Your data is replicated around. All >> those copies have to be found and 'deleted'. The indexes are seperate and >> have to be deleted too. There may be many. >> >> In fact most of the time the data isn't actually deleted. >> Just Tombstoned. Marked as deleted, so the space is not actually reclaimed >> right away (to be sold again). Would be to much work to remove the 'holes' >> all the time. >> >> The space will probably be reclaimed eventually, when the tablets are >> compacted. But not right away >> >> >> In fact when a Application is deleted, wouldnt be surprised if Google >> don't jsut absorb the storage cost, and not actully bother deleting the >> data. Deletions will be relativly rare, and few will leave large amounts of >> data lying around. Will just be orphaned and ignored. >> >> >> >> >> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
