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

Disadvantages of the SimpleDB model


SimpleDB's alternative approach also has some disadvantages compared to a relational database for certain applications.

  • Those using applications that always need to ensure immediate consistency of data will find that SimpleDB's eventual data consistency model may not suit their needs. The consistent read announcement does change this, but the eventual consistency model is still the basis of the extreme scalability.

  • Using SimpleDB as the data storage engine in your applications needs the development team to get used to different concepts over a simple, traditional RDBMS.

  • Because relationships are not explicitly defined at the schema level as in a relational database, you might need to enforce some data constraints within your application code.

  • If your application needs to store data other than strings, such as numbers and dates, additional effort will be required on your part to encode the strings before storing them in the SimpleDB format.

  • The ability to have...