Why SimpleDB Matters

Here's a good post on SimpleDB usages and why SimpleDB matters.

Very, very simplistically speaking, domains are like tables, with items like rows and attributes like columns. A query cannot cross domains, so in this analogy you can’t “join” domains. But that sort of thinking is a holdover from the relational database normalized model.In reality a domain is much more like a database, so we have to stop thinking in terms of tables and joins.

And another interesting post:

To Rule the Clouds Takes Software: Why Amazon SimpleDB is a Huge Next Step

I love how this one starts with a good Lord of the Rings analogy:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them…

J. R. R. Tolkien

Amazon is handing out the nine rings to us humans, that's for sure, but I don't think they are as evil as Sauron... or are they? ;)

Amazon Rolls Out The Missing Piece to Its Web Services Empire: SimpleDB

Amazon announced a limited beta for SimpleDB, their latest web service offering. A reliable, scalable database has been a particular pain point for EC2 users since EC2 is unreliable. Running a database on an EC2 instance is like driving your car over the Bay Bridge; you just know it's going to fall down at some point, you just hope you're not driving that day (and that your parachute (backup) is freshly packed).

To use Amazon SimpleDB you:

• CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
• GET, PUT or DELETE items in your domain, along with the attribute-value pairs that you associate with each item.  Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data as it is added to your domain so that it can be quickly retrieved; there is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later.  Each item can have up to 256 attribute values.  Each attribute value can range from 1 to 1,024 bytes.
• QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators: =, !=, <, > <=, >=, STARTS-WITH,  AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION.  Query execution time is currently limited to 5 seconds.  Amazon SimpleDB is designed for real-time applications and is optimized for those use cases.
• Pay only for the resources that you consume.

Some key points:

• 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.

How many smart people does Amazon have working on this stuff?

Amazon Announces $100,000 Start-Up Challenge Winner

Out of over 900 business plan entries submitted by developers building their products and services using the AWS platform, Ooyala is announced the winner of the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. Ooyala is a video company delivering a high quality interactive video experience with monetization and analytics tools for video publishers and advertisers. As the grand prize winner, Ooyala will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Service credits and an investment offer from Amazon.com. Click here for more on the contest.

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

“When we started Ooyala, we were warned that we would spend most of our time in datacenters at 2 a.m. making sure everything worked,” said Sean Knapp, Founder and President of Technology for Ooyala. “Very few companies in the world can provide the infrastructure services Amazon can provide. Why would you do it yourself? AWS has enabled Ooyala to build, deploy and scale our product in record time, raising the bar for rapid innovation.”

Read more at Business Wire.