i don't see the reason for this. true, from GAE's docs (http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/storage_breakdown.html):
"Because App Engine's datastore is essentially schemaless, every entity of a particular kind must store the name of each property in addition to the value, even if every other entity of that kind uses the same set of properties. While this redundancy does result in a slight storage overhead, it also offers more flexibility for model definitions (see Effective PolyModel <http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/polymodel.html> for an example)." i understand saving space on limited hardware, and yes with millions of rows you might have a GB of storage for those names, so that might cost you $0.15 a month, but i believe that cluttering your code with extra things like aliases, and making a database that can't be used without the code (no one would be able to understand the data if viewed in the GAE console), i'd pay the $0.15 a month. just my $0.03. ;) cfh
