All interaction with SimpleDB is in the form of XML documents that contain the requests. The underlying libraries that are used for communicating with SimpleDB will usually take care of the creation and parsing of these XML documents and present the results to you in a format specific to the library. In our case, boto is translating the XML responses from SimpleDB into simple Python objects that can be consumed by our application. The use of XML implies that you cannot send across any Unicode characters as a part of your data values that are invalid XML characters. You can insert invalid XML characters using the ReST API and they will be stored in SimpleDB, and will be automatically encoded as base64 strings when retrieved. If you do need to store these characters in SimpleDB, a simple way of doing that would be to encode these characters using a base64 encoding, and then store them in SimpleDB. You will, of course, need to decode them after retrieval before use...
Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide
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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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Free Chapter
Getting to Know SimpleDB
Getting Started with SimpleDB
SimpleDB versus RDBMS
The SimpleDB Data Model
Data Types
Querying
Storing Data on S3
Tuning and Usage Costs
Caching
Customer Reviews