In the App Engine Documentation I found an interesting strategy for keeping up to date with changes in the datastore by using Cursors:
An interesting application of cursors is to monitor entities for unseen changes. If the app sets a timestamp property with the current date and time every time an entity changes, the app can use a query sorted by the timestamp property, ascending, with a Datastore cursor to check when entities are moved to the end of the result list. If an entity's timestamp is updated, the query with the cursor returns the updated entity. If no entities were updated since the last time the query was performed, no results are returned, and the cursor does not move.
However, I'm not quite sure how this can always work. After all, when using the High Replication Datastore, queries are only eventually consistent. So if two entities are put, and only the later of the two is seen by the query, it will move the cursor past both of them. Which will mean that the first of the two new entities will remain unseen.
So is this an actual issue? Or is there some other way that cursors work around this?