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

Query API and authentication


There are two interfaces to SimpleDB. The SOAP interface uses the SOAP protocol for the messages, while the ReST Requests uses HTTP requests with request parameters to describe the various SimpleDB methods and operations. In this book, we will be focusing on using the ReST Requests for talking to SimpleDB, as it is a much simpler protocol and utilizes straightforward HTTP-based requests and responses for communication, and the requests are sent to SimpleDB using either a HTTP GET or POST method.

The ReST Requests need to be authenticated in order to establish that they are originating from a valid SimpleDB user, and also for accounting and billing purposes. This authentication is performed using your access key identifiers. Every request to SimpleDB must contain a request signature calculated by constructing a string based on the Query API and then calculating an RFC 2104-compliant HMAC-SHA1 hash, using the Secret Access Key.

The basic steps in the authentication...