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.

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Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide
Jun, 2010 | 252 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide
Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide
Credits
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting to Know SimpleDB
Getting to Know SimpleDB
Experimenting with SimpleDB
How does SimpleDB work?
How do I interact with SimpleDB?
How is SimpleDB priced?
Why should I use SimpleDB?
Summary
2
Getting Started with SimpleDB
Getting Started with SimpleDB
Creating an AWS account
Enabling SimpleDB service for AWS account
Query API and authentication
SimpleDB libraries
SDBtool — Firefox plugin
Sample outline — performing basic operations
Basic operations with Java
Basic operations with PHP
Basic operations with Python
Summary
3
SimpleDB versus RDBMS
SimpleDB versus RDBMS
No normalization
No joins
No schemas
Simpler SQL
Only strings
Eventual consistency
Scalability
Low maintenance
Advantages of the SimpleDB model
Disadvantages of the SimpleDB model
Summary
4
The SimpleDB Data Model
The SimpleDB Data Model
Domains
Exploring the metadata for a domain and costs
Items
Attributes
Values
Consistent Read and Conditional Put / Delete announcement
Summary
5
Data Types
Data Types
What is lexicographical comparison?
Storing numeric values
Storing date values
Storing Boolean values
XML-restricted characters
Summary
6
Querying
Querying
Sample data
Comparison operators
Queries with Select
Combining expressions
Sorting
Counting the results
Queries on multi-valued attributes
Querying for multi-valued attributes
Summary
7
Storing Data on S3
Storing Data on S3
Amazon S3
Pricing for S3
Plan of action
Summary
8
Tuning and Usage Costs
Tuning and Usage Costs
BoxUsage
Partitioning
Summary
9
Caching
Caching
Caching
Memcached
Memcached and security
Installing memcached
Installing memcached client
Storing and retrieving data from memcached
Cache_Lite
Logic flow for using caching with SimpleDB
Summary
10
Parallel Processing
Parallel Processing
BatchPutAttributes
Serialized SimpleDB requests
Parallelizing SimpleDB requests
Concurrency and SimpleDB
Summary

Simpler SQL

Structured Query Language (SQL) is a standard language that is widely used for accessing and manipulating the data stored in a relational database. SQL has evolved over the years into a highly complex language that can do a vast variety of things to your database. SimpleDB does not support the complete SQL language, but instead it lets you perform your data retrieval using a much smaller and simpler subset of an SQL-like query language. This simplifies the whole process of querying your data. A big difference between the simpler SQL supported by SimpleDB and SQL is the support for multi-valued SimpleDB attributes, which makes it super simple to query your data and get back multiple values for an attribute.

The syntax of the SimpleDB SQL is summarized in this syntax: 

select output_list
from domain_name
[where expression]
[sort_instructions]
[limit limit]

We will go into detail on SimpleDB SQL in Chapter 6,Querying.

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