Introduction to Amazon SimpleDB

Features

• Simple to use—Amazon SimpleDB provides streamlined access to the lookup and query functions that traditionally are achieved using a relational database cluster – while leaving out other complex, often-unused database operations. The service allows you to quickly add data and easily retrieve or edit that data through a simple set of API calls. Accessing these capabilities through a web service also eliminates the complexity of maintaining and scaling these operations.

• Flexible—With Amazon SimpleDB, it is not necessary to pre-define all of the data formats you will need to store; simply add new attributes to your Amazon SimpleDB data set when needed, and the system will automatically index your data accordingly. The ability to store structured data without first defining a schema provides developers with greater flexibility when building applications.

• Scalable—Amazon SimpleDB allows you to easily scale your application. You can quickly create new domains as your data grows or your request throughput increases. For the Beta release, a single domain is limited in size to 10 GB and you are limited to a maximum of 100 domains; however, over time these limits may be raised.

• Fast—Amazon SimpleDB provides quick, efficient storage and retrieval of your data to support high performance web applications.

• Reliable—The service runs within Amazon's high-availability data centers to provide strong and consistent performance. To prevent data from being lost or becoming unavailable, your fully indexed data is stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.

• Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services—Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other web-scale services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. For example, developers can run their applications in Amazon EC2 and store their data objects in Amazon S3. Amazon SimpleDB can then be used to query the object metadata from within the application in Amazon EC2 and return pointers to the objects stored in Amazon S3.

• Inexpensive—Amazon SimpleDB passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon's scale. You pay only for resources you actually consume. Compare this with the significant up-front expenditures traditionally required to obtain software licenses and purchase and maintain hardware, either in-house or hosted. This frees you from many of the complexities of capacity planning, transforms large capital expenditures into much smaller operating costs, and eliminates the need to over-buy "safety net" capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.