Comments on: Amazon SimpleDB thoughts

By: SDB Explorer

SDB Explorer — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 05:21:29 +0000

@spk You can not upload blobs to Amazon SimpleDB. You can upload your blobs to Amazon S3 and store uploaded blob’s web URLs to Amazon SimpleDB.

By: spk

spk — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 04:58:55 +0000

does anyone know if you can store blobs (like pictures) in simpledb?

By: ryan

ryan — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:37:39 +0000

@Andrew, good question. you're right, the answer is that reads may see old versions of data, and yes, that means it's often more difficult to use than a strongly consistent system.

however, since i wrote this, it looks like amazon has added strong consistency support to simpledb. nice!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 04 May 2011 16:26:48 +0000

What does “eventual consistency” mean in a system without transactional semantics? If your only operations are get, put and delete, how can something ever be inconsistent – inconsistent with what? If the answer is that you may get old versions of data when a get is requested after a put has been successfully completed, then this would seem to be a problem for a huge number of applications. Are there timing guarantees – do I know my put will be “committed” within a certain amount of time? Is there any way to know that the data you receive is not current? That would help, but not much.

Thoughts?

By: SDB Explorer

SDB Explorer — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:48:53 +0000

SDB Explorer has been made as an industry leading graphical user interface (GUI) to explore Amazon SimpleDB service thoroughly and in a very efficient and user friendly way.

By: Philipp Lenssen

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your tuplespaces link doesn’t seem to go anywhere in specific…

By: ryan

ryan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

thanks, fixed.

By: Pedro Marban

Pedro Marban — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

God post. It aid in clearing my doubts about SimpleDB.

I think that the big value of SimpleDB is the concept (a limitlessly scalable DB accessible everywhere by webservices) not the implementation. I believe that soon other big players will come with similar proposals.

By: Eric Litman

Eric Litman — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nice. Would love to see a follow-up with your thoughts after some usage.

By: Sam Figueroa

Sam Figueroa — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I can't see myself using the service anytime soon. The limitations it imposes feel way to strong to me. The lack for specific datatypes makes me feel cold, like it did going from Java to PHP. No ordering? What's up with that? If they can do EC2 and S3 they sure could have managed to implement ordering. This would make a many situation very frustrating to code. If they don't want to stick to a SQL subset, I can live with that. But come on. I know they are calling it SimpleDB for a reason, but I can't see modern web apps being able to utilize this as their primary database.

Could somebody point out to me some obvious applications of SimpleDB?