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

Basic operations with Python


Prabhakar Chaganti: "My personal preference is for the Python library—boto, which has a very nicely designed interface and a great community of users".

Python is an elegant, open source, object-oriented programming language that is great for rapid application development. Python is a stable, mature language that has been around for quite a long period of time, and is widely used across many of the industries and in a large variety of applications. It comes with an interactive console that can be used for quick evaluation of code snippets and makes experimentation with new APIs very easy. Python is a dynamically-typed language that gives you the power to program in a compact and concise manner. There is no such verbosity that is associated with a statically-typed language such as Java. It will be much easier to grasp the concepts of SimpleDB without drowning in a lot of lines of repetitive code. Most importantly, Python will bring fun back into your programming...