Thinking about Amazon’s SimpleDB
Ryan Barrett is sharing his thoughts on Amazon’s new hosted database service:1
Sure, it’s limited. It includes design decisions that clearly simplified the implementation at the cost of functionality and usability. Still, as a result of those decisions, SimpleDB has the potential to be very robust, scalable, and performant.
We’re considering implementing our next product at work with Amazon’s new hosted services, including SimpleDB. Their S3 storage seems like a no-brainer, and their EC2 virtual server service seems very useful. As somebody who thinks in relational terms, though, I’m still skeptical of such a simple data store.
- Via Daring Fireball. [↩]
Dec 27 2007
4:55 pm
The simpler hash store has been a lingering approach for a while now, recently resurfacing with CouchDB’s popularity. The first thing I thought when CouchDB surfaced was that here was another generation of developers ignoring the relational model, and inventing something old again. But there are enough seasoned minds on both CouchDB and SimpleDB that there must be something in the simplicity, or in the differences implied by the scales involved (and therefore I must be wrong).
I’m going to spend some time next week with CouchDB and see if I can see what others are raving about. As I’ve spent a lot of time now with SQLite’s approach, I have a reasonable perspective on what’s possible with a quick relational store.