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

Advantages of the SimpleDB model


SimpleDB's alternative approach for storing data can be advantageous for meeting your application needs when compared to a traditional relational database. Here's the list of advantages:

  • Reduced maintenance as compared to a relational database

  • Automated indexing of your data for fast performance

  • Flexibility to modify or change your stored data without the need to worry about schemas

  • Failover for your data automatically being provided by Amazon

  • Replication for your data across multiple nodes also handled for you by Amazon

  • Ability to easily scale up in response to increased demand without worrying about running out of hardware or processing capacity

  • Simplified data storage and querying using a simple API

  • The lack of object-to-relational mapping that is common for an RDBMS allows your structured data to map more directly to your underlying application code and reduce the application development time