

Don't Forget: You Can Use Amazon SimpleDB For Free - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/10/dont-forget-you-can-use-amazon-simpledb-for-free.html

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wrath
I've had a descent amount of experience with SimpleDb and unfortunately I
don't find it as good as what Amazon makes it out to be. The name "Simple"
defines the service very well.

There are too many limitations which makes SimpleDb almost impossible to use
for complex data storage. A few examples of annoying limitations:

1\. SimpleDb is a Key to list value pair storage engine (e.g. Key = Name,
Values = [John, George, Ringo, Paul]). Seems good but you can only have 256
values per record.

2\. Each value is limited to 1024 characters (512 for double byte)

3\. Where clauses of "select" statements are ordered by their ascii values.
Makes things relatively complex numeric values. Here's some suggestions from
amazon when working with numerical values.

[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimpleDB/2007-11-07/...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimpleDB/2007-11-07/DeveloperGuide/index.html?NumericalData.html)

and floating points are especially annoying:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/691778/best-way-to-
format...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/691778/best-way-to-format-
single-double-values-as-strings-for-simpledb)

Bottom line, my take is if you want to use SimpleDb for simple data storage,
it's a wonderful service and relatively cost effective. If you're data is or
will become complex then it's not the service for you. I'd look into Google
App Engine for a robust and "free" service.

~~~
qhoxie
What you said is very true, and a good summary of shortcomings, but I'd like
to note a real benefit it affords you despite these drawbacks.

While 3. is a pain-point in many systems, the fact that you _can_ do selects
with where clauses on a key-value store that scales horizontally is
impressive. The indexing they do can be very helpful in certain
implementations.

~~~
jbellis
10 GB per domain isn't a hell of a lot of scaling.

~~~
qhoxie
True, it's no Cassandra :)

Anyway I think 10gb per domain is reasonable for many people, but it is
another limit of the store that could cause problems. Fortunately Amazon knows
the boundaries of SDB, so it can put these in place and help inform decisions
about using it for, say, a project that will need more than 10gb per domain,
or more than 100 domains.

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stanley
Has anyone had experience utilizing memcached with SimpleDB? Were there
issues?

In terms of price, after the free quota is surpassed, does SimpleDB make sense
for relatively small sites? i.e. sites with fewer than 200k uniques / month

~~~
qhoxie
If you don't throw too much traffic at it you will be fine using it as a
memcached alternative, but you will probably notice the overhead of an HTTP
transaction. It largely depends on what you are doing.

It seems like you are referring to using it as a cache only, and on those
terms, it really depends on your traffic profile. Chances are, though, with
200k uniques you would be pleased. If you are running in EC2, the bandwidth is
free, so you only pay for computation. That can keep things pretty
inexpensive.

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euroclydon
That's a pretty substantial service to offer for free and it seems you can
access it from Javascript too. I wonder if it would violate their terms of
service to write an application where each user had their own Simple DB
account?

~~~
jeffbarr
This would be perfectly acceptable, come on in!

You would have to ask each new user to create an AWS account (also free) and
then enter their credentials (public key and private key). If you are building
a browser-based app you need to protect the credentials from prying eyes/code.

~~~
anamax
> If you are building a browser-based app you need to protect the credentials
> from prying eyes/code.

Isn't this the problem that oauth is intended to solve?

~~~
jrockway
But having web users bring their own database is not the problem that AWS is
trying to solve.

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euroclydon
Could this be used as an alternative to the AWS Message Queue?

[Edit] Now that I am having a little coffee, I realize that you would have
difficulty knowing what the keys are to the queued messages. I guess you could
use a set of known keys, and cycle through them looking for messages, but why
be a cheapskate.

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rogerthat
Can you upload files to SimpleDB and use it as a free alternative to Amazon
S3? I imagine not but I'm curious anyway.

~~~
qhoxie
The only way to achieve this would be to shard the file across multiple
entries. The limit per is 1k, so I doubt it would fit your needs. There is
also a hard limit of 1gb per domain, which is not difficult to run up against
if you treat it as a more generic data store.

~~~
rogerthat
It figures - I wouldn't expect them to canabalize S3. Thanks for the details
though.

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aw3c2
___if_ __you are already paying for AWS, correct?

~~~
qhoxie
AWS products are pay as you go, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. This
will be free until you cross the limit.

