Datastore API Calls vs Datastore Queries

Question

In Quota Details (appengine dashboard) there are two items under the Storage section.

Datastore API Calls with a limit of 141,241,791

Datastore Queries with a limit of 417,311,168

What is the difference between these two? And why is the latter's limit 3x larger?

Answer 1

Fetching entities from the datastore or writing entities to the datastore are API calls, and neither requires a query. Remember, the datastore does not use SQL; a "query" is only done when you're searching for entities whose index entries match your criteria, not for any other operation.