Google Cloud SQL is an easy-to-use service that delivers fully managed MySQL databases. It lets you hand off to Google the mundane, but necessary and often time consuming tasks — like applying patches and updates, managing backups and configuring replications — so you can put your focus on building great applications. And because we use vanilla MySQL, it’s easy to connect from just about any application, anywhere.

The first generation of Cloud SQL was launched in October 2011 and has helped thousands of developers and companies build applications. As Compute Engine and Persistent Disk have made great advancements since their launch, the second generation of Cloud SQL builds on their innovation to deliver an even better, more performant MySQL solution at a better price/performance ratio. We’re excited to announce the beta availability of the second generation of Cloud SQL — a new and improved Cloud SQL for Google Cloud Platform.

Speed, more speed and scalability

The two principal goals of the second generation of Cloud SQL are: better performance and scalability per dollar. The performance graph below speaks for itself. Second generation Cloud SQL is more than seven times faster than the first generation of Cloud SQL. And it scales to 10TB of data, 15,000 IOPS and 104GB of RAM per instance — well beyond the first generation.

Source: Google internal testing

Yoga for your database (Cloud SQL is flexible)

Cloud users appreciate flexibility. And while flexibility is not a word frequently associated with relational databases, with Cloud SQL we’ve changed that. Flexibility means easily scaling a database up and down. For example, a database that’s growing in size and number of queries per day might require more CPU cores and RAM. A Cloud SQL instance can be changed to allocate additional resources to the database with minimal downtime. Scaling down is just as easy.

Flexibility means easily connecting to your database from any client with Internet access, including Compute Engine, Managed VMs, Container Engine and your workstation. Connectivity from App Engine is only offered for Cloud SQL First Generation right now, but that will change soon. Because we embrace open standards by supporting MySQL Wire Protocol, the standard connection protocol for MySQL databases, you can access your managed Cloud SQL database from just about any application, running anywhere. For example:

• Use all your favorite tools, such as MySQL Workbench, Toad and the MySQL command-line tool to manage your Cloud SQL instances
• Get low latency connections from applications running on Compute Engine and Managed VMs
• Use standard drivers, such as Connector/J, Connector/ODBC, and Connector/NET, making it exceptionally easy to access Cloud SQL from most applications

Flexibility also means easily starting and stopping databases. Many databases must run 24x7, but some are used only occasionally for brief or infrequent tasks. Cloud SQL can be managed using the Cloud Console (our browser-based administration console), command line (part of our gCloud SDK) or a RESTful API. The command line interface (CLI) and API make Cloud SQL administration scriptable and help users maximize their budgets by running their databases only when they’re needed.

The graph below shows the number of active Cloud SQL database instances running over time. Notice the clusters of five sawtooth-like ridges and then a drop for two additional ridges. These clusters show an increased number of databases running during business hours on Monday through Friday each week. Database activity, measured by the number of active databases, falls outside of business hours, especially on the weekends. This repeated rise and fall of database instances is a great example of flexibility. Its magnitude is helped significantly by first generation Cloud SQL’s ability to automatically sleep when it is not being accessed. While this is not a design goal of the second generation of Cloud SQL, users can quickly create and delete, or start and stop databases that only need to run on occasion. Cloud SQL users get the most from their budget because of the service’s flexibility.

What is a "managed" MySQL database?

Cloud SQL delivers fully managed MySQL databases, but what does that really mean? It means Google will apply patches and updates to MySQL, manage your backups, configure replication and provide automatic failover for High Availability (HA) in the event of a zone outage. It also means that you get Google’s operational expertise for your MySQL database. Google’s team of MySQL experts make configuring replication and automatic failover a breeze, so your data is protected and available. They also patch your database when important security updates are delivered. You choose when (day and time of week) the updates should be applied, and Google’s team takes care of the rest. This combined with Cloud SQL’s automatic encryption on database tables, temporary files and backups ensures your data is secure.

High Availability, replication and backups are configurable, so you can choose what's appropriate for each of your database instances. For development instances, you can choose to opt out of replication and automatic failover, while your production instances are fully protected. Even though we manage the database, you’re still in control.

Pricing: commitment issues

Getting the best Cloud SQL price doesn’t require you to commit to a one- or three-year contract. To get the best Cloud SQL price, just run your database 24x7 for the month. That’s it. If you use a database infrequently, you’ll be charged by the minute at the standard price. But there’s no need to decide upfront and Google helps find savings for you. No commitment, no strings attached. As a bonus, everyone gets the 100% sustained use discount during Beta, regardless of usage.

Ready to get started?

If you haven’t signed up for Google Cloud Platform, do so now and get a $300 credit to test drive Cloud SQL. The second generation Cloud SQL has inexpensive micro instances for small applications, and easily scales up and out to serve performance-intensive applications.

You can also take advantage of our growing partner ecosystem and tools to make working in Cloud SQL even easier. We’ve partnered with Talend, Attunity, Dbvisit and xPlenty to help you streamline the process of loading your data into Cloud SQL and with analytics products Tableau, Looker, YellowFin and Bime so you can easily create rich visualizations for meaningful insights. We’ve also integrated with ScaleArc and WebYog to help you monitor and manage your database and have partnered with service providers like Pythian, so you can have expert support during your Cloud SQL implementations. Reach out to any of our partners if you need help getting up and running.

Bottom Line

Cloud SQL Second Generation makes what customers love about Cloud SQL First Generation faster and more scalable, at a better price per performance.



- Posted by Brett Hesterberg, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

• Tableau - Learn More and Free Trial
• Google BigQuery
• Google BigQuery & Tableau Best Practices Whitepaper
• Twitter-for-BigQuery on GitHub

Google Cloud SQL read replicas are now available in preview mode for MySQL 5.5 (support for MySQL 5.6 is coming soon).

Read Replica instances allow data from the master instance to be replicated to one or more slaves. This setup can provide increased read throughput. It can also enable the use of Cloud SQL instances as a hot standby for disaster recovery and for running OLAP queries without affecting the performance of the master instance. This support for Cloud SQL Read Replicas comes in addition to the existing support for using customer-managed MySQL instances (running on-premise, on Compute Engine or in another environment) as Read Replicas.

You can try it now by following these instructions.

-Posted by Aditya Mone, Software Engineer

Google Cloud SQL is a fully managed MySQL service hosted on Google Cloud Platform, providing a database backbone for applications running on Google App Engine or Google Compute Engine. Over the last few months we’ve been very busy adding an SLA, encrypting all your data, enabling point-in-time-recovery and custom flags, and launching instances in Asia (alongside the US and EU).

Today, we’re adding instances running MySQL 5.6, which includes great new features such as geospatial distance queries, full text indexing in InnoDB tables, online schema changes, and a bunch of performance improvements. You can try it now, and there are instructions on migrating existing instances here.

-Posted by Joe Faith, Product Manager

Google Cloud SQL is a fully managed MySQL service hosted on Google Cloud Platform, providing a database backbone for applications running on Google App Engine or Google Compute Engine. Today, we are launching two nice new features that give you more visibility and control over your Cloud SQL databases: point-in-time recovery and custom MySQL flags.

Point-in-time recovery allows you to recover an instance to a specific point in time. For example, if an operator ‘fat finger’ error causes a loss of data you can recover a database to the state it was just before the error occurred. It’s also great for testing your application and diagnosing issues since you can clone your live data to a testing database. See the point-in-time-recovery docs for more information.

Custom MySQL flags allow you to configure and tune your database to support particular applications and improve performance. For example, some applications require certain MySQL settings that are now supported by Cloud SQL, such as maximum packet sizes. You can also use custom flags to enable the MySQL slow query log to help spot performance issues, or put the database into read-only mode. There’s a full list of the flags you can set here.

Hosting your data in Google Cloud SQL gives you convenience and peace of mind; and now you get more control too. Get started with Cloud SQL today.

-Posted by Joe Faith, Product Manager

App Engine for PHP allows PHP developers to quickly build robust, scalable and secure PHP applications. But the beating heart of almost every great PHP project is a robust MySQL database. Recently we announced the General Availability of Google Cloud SQL - our enterprise class, fully managed MySQL service. And as you would hope, it integrates seamlessly with Google App Engine.

Because Cloud SQL is based on MySQL, PHP users will find that using App Engine and Cloud SQL together feels very familiar. You can use many standard MySQL tools to manage your app’s Cloud SQL database, such as the MySQL command-line client, MySQL Workbench, phpMyAdmin, as well as the Cloud SDK. You can even set up phpMyAdmin as an App Engine app itself.

Cloud SQL allows developers to spin up complex PHP applications on App Engine very easily - and take advantage of App Engine’s security and scalability. For example, it is trivial to get WordPress running on App Engine.

There are lots of features that make Cloud SQL a great fit for sites with low and intermittent traffic.

• The per-use billing plan means you only pay for the time the database is being accessed; the rest of the time you only pay for storage. You can also start with a small instance costing just $0.025/h, and at any time you can increase capacity with just a few seconds downtime.
• The same scalability applies to storage: you don't need to reserve space in advance, and you only pay for the data you actually store — up to a whopping 500GB.
• Reliability and robustness are crucial, so all data is replicated multiple times in multiple locations, and automatically backed up. All data is also encrypted when stored, and when on Google's networks.

While being able to run applications on the cheap is nice, Cloud SQL is also being used by large businesses like Costco to provide storage for major e-commerce sites, because of features like automated backups, data replication, and automated patches. In fact, SaaS providers like Kissflow can provide a database for each of the customers of their workflow service, without worrying about issues like noisy neighbors or resource allocation.

Links:
WordPress starter project
Google Cloud Platform project sign-up
Cloud SQL documentation
Getting Started with App Engine for PHP

-Posted by Amy Unruh, Developer Relations

Today’s guest blog comes from Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO at CodeFutures. CodeFutures is the maker of dbShards Technology, a proven suite of components and tools for working with relational database management systems. dbShards database clusters have been in production for over 3 years in demanding applications supporting multi-terabyte databases with high read and write loads.

Based on our extensive expertise in the database scalability, we were intrigued to work with Google Cloud SQL because if its reliability features. For example, every byte written to Cloud SQL is stored multiple times in multiple locations, so the data is safe and available even in the case of multiple outages, an unmatched capability with Database as a Service vendors.

We initially tested with our dbShards/Migrate tools, allowing customers to seamlessly move their databases from any location — a traditional data center or another cloud vendor — to Google Cloud SQL. The product is based on dbShards patented replication technology, called Continuous Replication, that allows customers to replicate their data from outside the DBMS engine. This results in a no-risk experience without downtime. dbShards/Migrate can also be used to maintain a disaster recovery site for their database, in a remote cloud region, or even hosted by a totally different cloud vendor.

The key to dbShards/Migrate is its ability to continuously and reliably replicate transactions from one database or cluster to another in a remote location over the internet as a wide area network. Because the product replicates transactions outside the DBMS, it is is even possible to replicate from a Database as a Service where access to standard vendor replication facilities may not be available. While dbShards/Migrate continuously replicates transactions from the source to the target environment, customers can perform a reliable point-in-time snapshot of the source database, restoring it in the target environment with no lost data. It is even possible to perform the process several times to ensure full testing of the new cloud environment before switching live application servers to the target provider.


During our tests, Cloud SQL performed extremely well. Our objective was to provide our initial test customer (http://www.genoo.com) with a near-zero downtime transition of their database from their existing cloud vendor to Google Cloud SQL. Using the Cloud SQL capabilities, we were able to perform the process repeatedly — and flawlessly. In fact, our customer told us they did not even notice that the transition had occurred. You can read more in this case study.

An important factor with Cloud SQL is its built-in redundancy. As mentioned earlier, data written to Cloud SQL is stored multiple times in multiple locations, offering an incredible level of reliability. dbShards replication technology can be used to supplement Cloud SQL’s reliability, to perform seamless database modifications when needed — all without downtime.

dbShards is of course well-known for its industry leading database sharding capabilities. This will be of particular benefit to large database users in Cloud SQL, as currently Cloud SQL has a limit of 500GB per instance. Using dbShards, a customer can support multiple terabytes of data, completely eliminating this limitation as a concern.

Next steps for CodeFutures will be to benchmark our scalability in Cloud SQL, validating dbShards sharding capabilities and comparing the results to other cloud vendors and MySQL alternatives.

Learn more about dbShards/Migrate here.

-Contributed by Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO, CodeFutures

Today’s guest post comes from Fritz Mueller, vice president of products at LiveHive, a cloud-based sales engagement platform that allows B2B sales teams to track customer touchpoints in real-time.

Founded in 2011, LiveHive enables sales teams to share materials with their customers and monitor how customers interact with these materials. Our service is cloud-based, which means sales teams who are often on the road can easily track their customers’ activities in real-time, and on the go.

From the beginning of the company, LiveHive wanted to outsource infrastructure management in a cost effective manner. We chose Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL because we wanted to focus our efforts on the product functionality that our customers wanted and not spend time dealing with infrastructure issues, including system maintenance, reliability, scalability and database administration.

LiveHive stores sales analytics, our customer-facing functionality and product usage metrics for internal business planning in Cloud SQL, which we’ve been using for the past six months. Our customer-facing sales analytics, viewed through interactive charts, graphs and maps online and via mobile device, are all driven by data in Cloud SQL.

Cloud SQL updates sales analytics and usage metrics continuously so customers and internal teams always have access to the latest information. We conduct trend and cohort analysis on the internal product usage metrics. This analysis identifies what features are most popular, which helps our sales and marketing teams understand what current and potential customers want in our product. LiveHive sales analytics tell our customers which sales materials their prospects find useful and then ranks prospect interest with our opportunity scoring system.

From a database perspective, Cloud SQL met our two key requirements: full functionality of a relational database and easy integration with our cloud platform application. Our initial setup with Cloud SQL was fast and seamless. Now, we have multiple database instances running with access to databases from any of our App Engine applications, which we’ve been using since 2011. The LiveHive sales engagement platform runs on App Engine and is accessed by customers through our web based user interface or mobile applications. This flexible access between App Engine and Cloud SQL allows us to maintain a test database that can be accessed from multiple development versions of the LiveHive application as well as a completely separate production environment. In both environments, our costs scale with usage, which is a big plus for us since we only pay for what we use.

We have already achieved one of our goals: to spend no time managing performance, reliability, administration or maintenance issues! Cloud SQL has more than met our expectations of a cloud-based relational database, and we continue to derive value from it.

-Contributed by Fritz Mueller, Vice President of Products, LiveHive

Google Cloud SQL is a fully managed MySQL service hosted on Google Cloud Platform, providing a database backbone for applications running on Google App Engine or Google Compute Engine. Today, we are announcing Cloud SQL is generally available (GA), now with: encryption of customer data, a 99.95% uptime SLA, and support for databases up to 500GB in size.

Secure Encrypted Data
Cloud SQL data is now automatically encrypted. This adds to the existing security and reliability features, including:

• Customer data, including in database tables and temporary files, is automatically stored encrypted (with encryption of backups coming soon).
• All Cloud SQL traffic on Google’s internal networks is encrypted.
• External connections can be encrypted using SSL.
• All hosts and Google App Engine applications connecting to your instance must be explicitly authorized.
• MySQL user grants can be used to control access at the database, table, or even column level.
• Data is replicated multiple times in multiple locations.
• Scheduled backups are automatically taken by default.

Larger databases
All Cloud SQL instances can now store up to 500GB, from our smallest D0 instance costing just $0.025 per hour up to D32 instances with 16GB of RAM. Your data is replicated multiple times in multiple zones and automatically backed up, all included in the price of the service. And you only pay for the storage that you actually use, so you don’t need to reserve this storage in advance.

SLA for availability
Replicated storage means we can guarantee 99.95% availability of the service. And because even a reduced service is not acceptable for many applications, we have set a high bar for availability: for example, we regard a single minute of just 20% connection failure as a downtime. See the SLA for more details.

Developer traction
Cloud SQL has seen some great developer traction, with a range of businesses relying on it for core applications:

• Costco uses Google Compute Engine and Cloud SQL to run public e-commerce sites. As Don Burdick, Senior Vice President of Global Ecommerce at Costco, says, “Costco is the world's leading membership club warehouse with annual sales exceeding $100B. As part of our philosophy to keep costs down and pass savings on to our members, in June 2013 we implemented our ecommerce site for Mexico on Google Cloud Platform. The site has been operational since October 2013 and the Google Cloud Platform performance has exceeded our expectations. As a result of this project's success, we're currently migrating the website of one of our other countries to Google Cloud Platform.”
• LiveHive is a social selling application used by 25,000+ sales professionals. Fritz Mueller, Vice President of Products says, "We found Google's Cloud SQL service to be an ideal combination of performance and convenience. Performance is key to us because we provide our customers with real-time data about their sales execution. With Google's Cloud SQL, we focus on building the functionality our customers want without worrying about reliability, scalability and upgrades."
• Ocado manages logistics and e-commerce for some of the largest supermarkets in the UK. General Manager James Donkin says, “We're excited about the flexibility Cloud SQL brings to support quick development cycles that foster innovation, while scaling easily when required.”
• Mark Kornfilt, co-founder of Live video streaming platform Livestream, said “Thanks to Google App Engine and Cloud SQL, we were able to go from a new product concept to its launch in less than two months. This allows us to focus on building the product instead of worrying about operations, and provides all the tools needed to build a robust, reliable and scalable web app out of the box.”

Try it now
Learn more about Google Cloud SQL and try it now here.

-Posted by Joe Faith, Product Manager

Google Cloud SQL is a fully managed MySQL service hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Today, we are embracing open standards and expanding customers’ choice of tools, technologies and architectures by adding support for native MySQL connections.

MySQL Wire Protocol is the standard connection protocol for MySQL databases. It lets you access your replicated, managed, Cloud SQL database from just about any application, running anywhere. Here are some of the top features enabled by the MySQL Wire Protocol:

• Low latency connections from applications running on Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine
• Use all your favourite tools such as MySQL Workbench, Toad and the MySQL command-line tool to manage your Cloud SQL instances
• Use standard drivers, such as Connector/J, Connector/ODBC, and Connector/NET, making it exceptionally easy to access Cloud SQL from most applications
• Replication to external MySQL databases for low latency connections and easy migration

Native connectivity also gives you great flexibility and control over managing and deploying your cloud databases. For example, you can use DBMoto from HiTSW to replicate data between Cloud SQL and on-premise databases -- including Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2. And you can use DBShards from CodeFutures to manage sharding across Cloud SQL instances, and migrate on- and off-cloud with no downtime.

Genoo, a SaaS provider of online marketing tools, has already put wire protocol support to use. They were outgrowing their existing cloud services provider, but were worried about migrating a live application to another environment. So Kim Albee, Genoo’s founder and President, turned to DBShards who used native connectivity to migrate Genoo’s database without any service disruption. She said, "I've been amazed by what Cloud SQL's support for native connections can do. Before this feature, migrating between cloud providers would have been too costly."

You can read more about how they did it in this case study, or learn more about Cloud SQL.

-Posted by Joe Faith, Product Manager

At JetBrains we are building tools that aim to enhance developers’ productivity by automating routine tasks and helping you concentrate on coding.

Our IDE for PHP, PhpStorm, provides seamless integration with Google App Engine for PHP — allowing you to locally develop, debug and deploy your PHP applications on Google App Engine. When testing your application locally, we also support full emulation of App Engine services through the App Engine Development server.

The following video shows how to get started with Google App Engine for PHP in PhpStorm. We also have a comprehensive tutorial which covers Google App Engine with PhpStorm in detail.




When creating Google App Engine applications in PHP using PhpStorm, chances are that you’ll also be using Google Cloud SQL to store data. For these next steps, we will have assumed you have created a Cloud SQL instance from the Google Cloud Console.

PhpStorm, as well as IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm, provides database management tools (see the right-hand side of the IDE or hit Ctrl+Alt+A (Cmd+Alt+A on Mac) and search for “Database”). You can use these built-in tools to create new tables, run arbitrary SQL commands and insert, update and delete data.

Opening the database pane, you can create a new connection or Data Source. You’ll have to specify the JDBC database driver to be used to connect to our database. Since Google Cloud SQL supports native MySQL connections, we can use the standard MySQL connector and enter connection details.

Connecting to a Google Cloud SQL database using PhpStorm database tools

The JDBC driver to use is com.mysql.jdbc.Driver, the database URL will be jdbc:mysql://:3306/ where cloudsql_ip_address is the IP address of our Google Cloud SQL instance, and database_name is the name of the specific database on that instance to which you want to connect.

As for database credentials, you can create a root user password through the Google Cloud Console or manually create a new user through PhpStorm using the following SQL statement:

CREATE USER 'user_here'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password_here';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'user_here'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;

You can now make use of these new credentials to connect to Google Cloud SQL and do things like create tables.

Creating a table in Google Cloud SQL using PhpStorm database tools

Now, from our PHP code, you can easily create a new connection to our Google Cloud SQL instance using PDO:

Connecting to a Google Cloud SQL database using PDO

Give it a try (a trial version is available for PhpStorm) and let us know your thoughts through the comments below.

-Contributed by Maarten Balliauw, Technical Evangelist, JetBrains

Do you need an environment that seamlessly scales to meet demand? Do multiple teams develop your app using a variety of programming languages? Do you need to mix managed applications and self-serve virtual machines running a variety of separate services? Google Cloud Platform has you covered on all fronts.

Take a look at our latest paper to learn how to overcome the challenges of deploying large applications in Cloud Platform. Our paper discusses a solution that shows how to use the right tools for:

• Different developer expertise
• Different data storage requirements
• Interactive and batch processing requirements
• Custom analysis engines
• Logically separate business components

Our paper walks through a real-world scenario of building a video sharing community. In this scenario, users upload videos from a mobile phone, the content is transcoded for playback in multiple formats and is presented on a web community site for watching and commenting.
Our sample solution showcases Google App Engine applications written in PHP, Java and Python. We use Google Cloud SQL for storing video metadata, to capitalize on the popularity and reduced learning curve of MySQL, and we store the videos in Google Cloud Storage for speed and scalability. The mobile client is written in Java and runs on Android. Hadoop clusters running on Google Compute Engine analyze and add sentiments to users' comments. And the whole shebang is orchestrated by another App Engine application. To learn how to build a solution like this yourself, get started now by reading all about it.

-Posted by Brian Lynch, Solutions Architect