[GNC] MySQL on GCP

[Charles Gagnon]

I wanted to share something quickly and ask a question at the same time.

I've been using gnucash since ~ 2001-2002 for my personal finances. I was
"closing" and starting fresh every year until 2006 at which point I just
started accumulated into the same file. So I currently have data in a
single file dating back to 2006.

I switched to MySQL backend years ago. I recently decided it would be nice
to get rid of some of my home lab machines so I made an experiment with
Google Cloud.

I had never read of anyone trying it but I restored my MySQL DB in a GCP
instance and have been using it as my main DB for several months. It opens
slower than my local database but it seems gnucash loads up the bulk of
what it needs in memory. So for normal day-to-day operations, you really
cannot tell the difference between the local instance and the cloud
instance.

My question is around online transactions. After importing, I would
typically spend some time in the window assigning the right accounts to the
transactions. This process is now terribly slow with the cloud DB so I'm
assuming it was written with lot of backend interactions. The workaround is
fairly simple, I import the transactions as-is (with or without an account)
and I re-visit in the register window to assign an account.

I figured I'd share and start a conversation. I also wanted to bring up the
online transactions situation even though it's easy to work around.

Regards,

PS: With a GCP based Linux desktop and the right packages to run gnucash
with a mysql backend, I could end-up with a completely portable solution
with the current codebase.