Can I connect to Google Cloud SQL from Google Compute Engine? - google-cloud-sql

Question

I am building a Django site on Google Compute Engine, and I want to install my database in SQL Cloud. It is possible?
What is the most common way to do this? Installing MySQL on virtual machine or use a Cloud SQL instance?
Thank you.

Answer 1

You can use either Google Cloud SQL or manage your own SQL database, depending on your needs.
To use Cloud SQL, you'd want to follow the instructions here: https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/docs/external
If you want to manage your own SQL database, you can install MySQL or some other database on an instance. Depending on your needs, you can start with a g1-small with a fairly large disk attached and then later use a larger instance type to run your database.
If you're running your own database, you'll need to make sure to take regular backups and copy them off the database machine, to someplace like Google Cloud Storage. If you're using Cloud SQL, you can use the console or the API to schedule database backups.

Answer 2

This answer is following up from "Well, the problem is that to use Cloud SQL, I must connect using JDBC. I'm using Python. How I can do?"
I am not from Python world, but I recently connected my Java app on GCE instance to a Cloud-Sql DB (via cloud-sql-proxy approach, as described here: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/compute-engine-access) and didn't see any reason why it shouldn't work for Python too.
Here is what I just tried and easily connected my test Python app to a Cloud-Sql DB, via the cloud-sql-proxy:
Step 1: Download and run the proxy on a local port, like below (this establishes a channel between the local port 3306 and the Cloud-SQL database instance identified by the connection name "PROJ_NAME:TIMEZONE:SQL_NAME"):
sudo wget https://dl.google.com/cloudsql/cloud_sql_proxy.linux.amd64
sudo mv cloud_sql_proxy.linux.amd64 cloud_sql_proxy
sudo chmod +x cloud_sql_proxy
sudo ./cloud_sql_proxy -instances=PROJ_NAME:TIMEZONE:SQL_NAME=tcp:3306 &
Step 2: Make sure that python-mysqldb is installed
sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb
Steo 3: Ran the following test program to connect to the Cloud-SQL db, via the local socket 3306, setup by the proxy:
import MySQLdb
conn = MySQLdb.connect(host= "127.0.0.1", port=3306, user="root", passwd="my_root_password", db="my_db")
x = conn.cursor()
try:
x.execute("""INSERT INTO Test(test_id) VALUES ('111')""")
conn.commit()
except:
conn.rollback()
conn.close()
Hope it helps.