Can I deploy a django app which uses sqlite3 as backend on google app engine?

Question

I created a simple bookmarking app using django which uses sqlite3 as the database backend.

Can I upload it to appengine and use it? What is "Django-nonrel"?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, no you can't. Google App Engine does not allow you to write files, and that is needed by SQLite.

Until recently, it had no support of SQL at all, preferring a home-grown solution (see the "CAP theorem" as for why). This motivated the creation of projects like "Django-nonrel" which is a version of Django that does not require a relational database. Recently, they opened a beta service that proposes a MySQL database. But beware that it is fundamentally less reliable, and that it is probably going to be expensive.

EDIT: As Nick Johnson observed, this new service (Google Cloud SQL) is fundamentally less scalable, but not fundamentally less reliable.