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

Amazon S3


Amazon S3 is a highly scalable and fast Internet data-storage system. It provides a query-based interface and is simple to use. There are three fundamental components that comprise S3—buckets, objects, and keys. We are going to discuss each of these here.

Buckets

Buckets are the fundamental building blocks in S3. Each object stored in S3 is contained within a bucket. A bucket is quite similar to a directory on the filesystem. The key advantage of an S3 bucket is that the bucket and its contents are addressable using a URL. For example, if you have a bucket named songs, with a file mysong.mp3, it can be addressed using the URL http://songs.s3.amazonaws.com/mysong.mp3.

Each S3 account can contain a maximum of 100 buckets. You can ensure the bucket is situated in a certain geographic location by specifying it at the time the bucket is created. Currently S3 is available in two different regions—the United States and the European Union. Amazon has recently announced that they are expanding...