Google Cloud Datastore
One of the services available to App Engine developers is Google Cloud Datastore, a NoSQL document database built for automatic scaling and high performance. Its limited featureset guarantees very high scale, but understanding the caveats and best practices is vital to a successful project.
Denormalizing data
Developers with experience of relational databases (RDBMS) will often aim to reduce data redundancy (trying to have each piece of data appear only once in their database) by normalizing data, spreading it across many tables, and adding references (foreign keys) before joining it back via a query to build a complete picture. In schemaless and NoSQL databases, we tend to do the opposite. We denormalize data so that each document contains the complete picture it needs, making read times extremely fast since it only needs to go and get a single thing.
For example, consider how we might model tweets in a relational database such as MySQL or Postgres:
A tweet itself contains...