Jonathan Simon (of Google) send in a note about a video walkthrough of the Google Cloud SQL product and how to get started using it from a basic PHP script.

Google Cloud SQL is a service that allows you to create, configure, and use relational databases that live in Google's cloud. It is a fully-managed service that maintains, manages, and administers your databases, allowing you to focus on your applications and services. By offering the capabilities of a familiar MySQL database, the service enables you to easily move your data, applications, and services in and out of the cloud. This enables high data portability and helps you achieve faster time-to-market because you can quickly leverage your existing database.

Most of the video is about the setup and creation of a new database in the cloud service, but closer to the end (starting at about 7:20) they walk you through the PHP side. The connection is just a simple mysql_connect (mysqli anyone?) to the remote Google host with the user/pass you set up before. They also show a bit about database management with a phpMyAdmin instance.

Since Google recently announced that they'd be supporting PHP on their App Engine service, developers have been trying out various setups to see how well they'd work. In this recent post Gilles Mergoil shares some of his experience with getting a Laravel 4-based application up and running in App Engine.

Now that Google App Engine opens to the PHP world and that the 4th version of the Laravel framework is officialy launched, we wanted to test these two promising technologies together at Neoxia. This blog post is the result of our tests whose goal was to have a standard Laravel 4 application on the Google App Engine PHP runtime up and running Given that an application without a database is not very useful, we also tested the Google Cloud SQL service which is the Google flavour of the MySQL database in the cloud.

He works through some of the steps for his first attempt at getting it set up, but notes that the seemingly working setup wasn't actually cooperating like it should. Thanks to some log analysis (and debugging) he found a few issues - missing functions, the lack of the mcrypt extension and session/cache/logging problems. He shows how to correct each of these and then moves on to connecting the app to a Google Cloud SQL database.