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

Sample data


We are going to use songs as our dataset. The following screenshot shows a section of my iTunes library and its song-listing window. We are going to take this information and store it in SimpleDB, and then run queries against this data.

The sample data shown in this screenshot is now displayed in table form, and we will be storing this data in SimpleDB.

Item name

Song

Artist

Year

Genre

Rating

112222222

My Way

Frank Sinatra

2002

Easy Listening

**** 4 stars Excellent

089997979

Hotel California

Gipsy Kings

 

World

****

982411114

Geraldine

Glasvegas

2008

Rock Alternative

*****

6767969119

Transmission

Joy Division

1981

Alternative

***** Excellent

6721309888

Guzarish

Ghazini

2008

Bollywood

Not rated Awful

0923424244

So What

Miles Davis

1959

Jazz

***** Wow!

5697878778

Allison

Pixies

1990

Alternative

**** 4 stars

7233929292

Pride

Syntax

 

Electronic Alternative

***** Excellent

5656600009

Acapulco

Neil Diamond

1980

Soundtrack

...