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

SDBtool — Firefox plugin


SDBtool is a Firefox plugin by Bizo Engineering for manipulating SimpleDB. As you go through the sample code, you can then view the results in the database. This is invaluable in both viewing results as well as updating or deleting data.

The program is a Firefox web browser (http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/) plugin. One of Firefox's key features is the ability to install plugins to expand the capabilities. Firefox is available for Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X as well as Linux.

To install SDBtool, visit http://code.google.com/p/SDBtool/ with a Firefox browser. Then click on the Click here to install link. Firefox will ask for a confirmation to install the plugin.

To start SDBtool, click on Tools | SDB Tool in the top menu.

When SDBtool starts for the first time, it is necessary to configure your Access Keys. Click on the Config button and enter your Access Key and Secret Key. There is also a checkbox that sets if the tool can delete a domain. If you are working...