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

About the Reviewers

Deepak Anupalli is Architect for the Server Engineering group at Pramati Technologies. He has deep insight into various Java/J2EE technologies. He represents Pramati on the EJB and JPA expert groups and has led the Java EE 5 certification effort of Pramati Server. He is currently leading the effort to build a standards-based web-scale Application server. He is a visiting faculty member with IIIT-Hyderabad for a course on middleware and also speaks at various technology conferences. He holds a graduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from National Institute of Technology (NIT Warangal, India).

Anders Samuelsson has over 25 years of experience in the computing industry. The main focus during this time has been with computer security. He currently works for Amazon.com with Amazon Web Services.

Ashley Tate is the founder of Coditate Software and the creator of Simple Savant, an advanced C# interface to SimpleDB. He is currently working on GridRoom, an application for collaborative sports-video review built on several Amazon Web Services, including SimpleDB. He lives near Atlanta with his wife and four children. You can find him online at http://blog.coditate.com.

 

I would like to dedicate this book to my brother Madhukar, who gave us all a big scare, and with typical panache came out of it stronger than ever, my sister-in-law Meghna for putting the rock of Gibraltar to shame and showing us all how to handle and deal with adversity, and my nephew Yuv, the two year old fire cracker. My two daughters Anika and Anya were understanding and patient beyond their years as I stuck to my Mac at all kinds of weird hours. Above all, this book would not have made it into the station without the constant support, love and encouragement from my lovely wife Nitika!

 
 --Prabhakar Chaganti
 

A special thanks to Dorothea, Mike, Mary, our little girl Margaret, and the gang at WCDR.

 
 --Rich Helms