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

Parallelizing SimpleDB requests


We can take advantage of the excellent support for concurrency available in SimpleDB by parallelizing our batch requests by multi-threading or using multiple processes to make requests in parallel. There are several different ways of parallelizing our requests using Python. We will look at the different ways of doing this in Python. We will be using the batch operation as an example to illustrate each threading example, but you can apply these principles with any of the SimpleDB operations:

  • Inserting items

  • Deleting items

  • Updating items

Parallelizing SimpleDB requests in Java

Java provides excellent support within the language for running operations concurrently. In this section, we will use the java.util.concurrent package to see how easy it is to insert multiple items concurrently into SimpleDB by using a threadpool. Recent versions of Java provide a ThreadPoolExecutor class that has all of the functionality that we need for our purpose. We will first instantiate...