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

Low maintenance


Maintaining a relational database and keeping it humming with indexing takes effort, know-how, and technical and administrative resources. Applications are not static but dynamic things, and change constantly along with additions of new features. All of these updates can result in changes and modifications to the database schema along with increased maintenance and tuning costs. SimpleDB is hosted and maintained for you by Amazon. Your task is as simple as storing your data and retrieving it when needed. The simplicity of structured data and lack of schemas helps your application be more flexible and adaptable to change, which is always around the corner. SimpleDB ensures that your queries are optimized and retrieval times are fast by indexing all your data automatically.