Google Cloud SQL is now accessible from just about any application, anywhere

OCT 30, 2013

By Joe Faith, Product Manager

Cross-posted from the Google Cloud Platform Blog

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.

Joe Faith is a Product Manager on the Google Cloud Team. In a previous life he was a researcher in machine learning, bioinformatics, and information visualization, and was founder of charity fundraising site Fundraising Skills.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor