Does anyone use Cloud SQL and have any experience? I’ve been reading a bit, and it seems it’s free under certain limits. To convert to paid service, I have to exceed a certain amount of query and data traffic, which I don’t think I can handle at the moment. While my app is in prototype form, I’d like to start testing. What do you think, experts? I welcome any feedback.
I don’t think its free. Cloud SQL runs in a virtual machine in the Google Cloud Platform. You will need to make a GCP Project and add the Cloud SQL instance into that project. You will have to set up a billing account.
It is possible that you are referring to Google Cloud free credit which is usually available as a one off for new subscribers to try GCP services. I believe that’s around £200 or more that the Cloud SQL project can use to run without you paying any actual money…well at least until the free credit runs out.
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Dear Scott, look at the following link and tell me what you understand because what I understood is that you have certain limits before you are charged.
“Store 10 GiB of data and run up to 1 TiB of queries for free per month”
I’m assuming I’m a single user who stores a few rows per month. I mean “a few,” with 5,000 rows, and that wouldn’t meet the minimum usage to start the billing process. But of course, I don’t know if I misunderstood.
I don’t think Big Query is a database as such? Its more like a data hub where you can bring in data from many different sources and analyse that data with the big query toolset.
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Okay, fine, I’m a total outsider on these topics, Scott. I’m an architect, a complete outsider, my friend! That’s why I don’t understand much. However, I saw a video that recommended using big queries for cases involving a lot of relational data.
I think there are other users in this community who use big query for some things. @MultiTech could be one of them.
If you were going to go down the route of Cloud SQL though, you would have to embrace a few things as a developer. First of all, say goodbye to easy schema modifications and updates like you have with Google Sheets. In fact, I would develop in Sheets first and only when the app is working to your satisfaction would I convert the tables over to Cloud SQL…something Appsheet makes very easy to do (as long as you have a Cloud SQL instance already configured and ready to accept Appsheet requests to generate tables etc).
Secondly, you would have to have (in my case because I used MySQL as the database) to locally install MySQL Workbench and (if your pesky internet service provider keeps changing your ip address) set up Cloud SQL proxy on your local machine also to be able to seamlessly connect to the database instance without having to keep approving new ip addresses in your instance on google cloud.
So there is a technical addition to be able to use Cloud SQL, but once it’s up and running it seems to be rock solid and very performant.
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A very good breakdown @scott192 ! 
No big query for me, but I do use Cloud SQL (using MySQL as it’s the less finicky of the types).
I also start building with Google Sheets, and then once I have things to a functional point where I’m happy I will migrate over to the SQL - but only for tables that I know are going to have many tens of thousands of records over time.
For a DB client on your PC, I use DBeaver.
The real nice thing about using a MySQL server is that you can go to your favorite language model and ask it for the query that you need to do whatever. You can easily export the schema of your database, which you can then give to the language model so it has a complete understanding of all of the columns in its types and everything. Then you can just say, hey little robot I need you to do xyz, and it’ll give you the code that you need to run. 
?
Makes it really fast to be able to do some incredibly complicated things (like when something went wrong and you have to do some updates of the database to fix things).
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Muchas gracias matt por tus consejos. Una cosa más, no sabía que podías alojar una base de datos en pc.