Gaebar

Like many other geeks, I am slightly distracted from everything that is computer throughout the holidays (except for playing Coloroid on my shiny new G1 phone :-). So, I'd like to send a quick shoutout to Aral Balkan who (unlike me) did not rest and released Google App Engine Backup and Restore (Gaebar), a module that can be used to backup and restore an App Engine datastore between different application servers. Beyond the obvious benefit of being able to get your data out of App Engine easily (which is cool, because it makes the platform even more open), it will also enable people longer term to do pretty sophisticated maintenance and system integration tasks. Assume for example that you run an online shopping cart but need to move your orders into an ERP or shipping system. Many of these systems are based on relational databases like Oracle or SQL Server. You could use a tool like Gae-SQLite to connect a local app engine instance to a relational database (I know it doesn't support many databases yet, but if there are enough helping hands from the open source community, it could). Combining this with gaebar, you could write your data into the RDBMS. Once it is in a relational view, the data should only be a script with a few INSERT statements away from being put into your ERP or shipment system.

I am sure there are many other cool ways to use this that I have not thought of -- like migrating data from one schema to another if you need to refactor your models during a new app release. What else could you guys see yourself doing using the Gaebar module? Post it to this thread :-)