Book Image

Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide

Book Image

Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide

Overview of this book

SimpleDB is a highly scalable, simple-to-use, and inexpensive database in the cloud from Amazon Web Services. But in order to use SimpleDB, you really have to change your mindset. This isn't a traditional relational database; in fact it's not relational at all. For developers who have experience working with relational databases, this may lead to misconceptions as to how SimpleDB works.This practical book aims to address your preconceptions on how SimpleDB will work for you. You will be quickly led through the differences between relational databases and SimpleDB, and the implications of using SimpleDB. Throughout this book, there is an emphasis on demonstrating key concepts with practical examples for Java, PHP, and Python developers.You will be introduced to this massively scalable schema-less key-value data store: what it is, how it works, and why it is such a game-changer. You will then explore the basic functionality offered by SimpleDB including querying, code samples, and a lot more. This book will help you deploy services outside the Amazon cloud and access them from any web host.You will see how SimpleDB gives you the freedom to focus on application development. As you work through this book you will be able to optimize the performance of your applications using parallel operations, caching with memcache, asynchronous operations, and more.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

BatchPutAttributes


The original release of SimpleDB only provided the ability to update or save attributes for a single item per call. As you can imagine, this can cause major performance issues if you had updated several items and their attributes, as you would have to make one SimpleDB call for each item. This may not seem like such a big deal, but once the number of items to be updated starts going above 100, this becomes very significant. SimpleDB released support for insert or update of multiple items in the form of BatchPutAttributes. This is a nice way to perform multiple PutAttribute operations in a single call, saving unnecessary round trips and network and HTTP response/request latencies to the SimpleDB server.

BatchPutAttributes in Java

In this section, we will create a Java class that will update attributes for multiple items by making a single call to SimpleDB. We will accomplish that by using the support for BatchPutAttributes provided by Typica. The following code runs a query...