Finally!

Google announces an honest-to-goodness relational DB for App Engine: Google Cloud SQL. And it's the nice, familiar MySQL engine with virtually full support and very few limitations. Notably missing from that FAQ is anything about limits on how long a statement can take to complete (I've asked the question), but other than that...

Google Apps migration and multiple accounts

Non-coding post today. If you use Google Apps for your Domain, you've either been transitioned to the new "full" infrastructure or you soon will be. If like a lot of people you have this crazy idea that your personal and professional lives should be separate, and so you have separate accounts for personal and private stuff, you'll run into the problem that your Google Apps stuff and your Google stuff now share an account cookie, and so trying to (say) view your personal email when you're logged into a Google service with your professional account will fail because you're logged in with your personal account. Sigh. If only there'd been a way to anticipate that this might be a problem and design and implement the solution properly before involuntarily migrating people over.

The good news is that Google now supports multiple account login in many of its services. You lose offline mail and calendar (huh?) and there are some other caveats, and it's still a PITA to use, but when/if you do manage to get signed into your multiple accounts on the services you mostly use, it does sort of work, a bit.

Hopefully as time marches by, the multiple accounts stuff will improve and spread to their other services.

V8 Raises the Bar Again

Google's V8 JavaScript engine is well-known for being freaky fast, but far from resting on their laurels, the V8 team are taking things to the next level. Their latest enhancement, which they call Crankshaft, is basically HotSpot for JavaScript. They scale back the optimizations done by the main compilation step, thereby compiling scripts faster and reducing page load time, but then identify and aggressively optimize hot spots in the code (code that runs frequently — like, say, a mousemove handler). It's an approach that worked well for Sun's Java runtime, and I bet it'll work well for V8.