

Amazon SimpleDB Goes Beta - blader
http://www.informationweek.com/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204803008&subSection=Enterprise+Applications
Scalable database as a service.<p>My previous employer Powerset was an early tester, good to see it finally out in the world.
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cperciva
This is cute, but doesn't really do anything which isn't already possible with
EC2 and S3. The most critical limitation of EC2 and S3, at least where
databases are concerned, is the "eventual consistency" model: If you store
data, you'll _eventually_ be able to get it back -- but there are no
guarantees as to when.

When I heard rumours that Amazon was going to be launching a database service,
I hoped that it would solve this problem; instead, it seems that Amazon has
released the world's first "database" which not only transactions, but even
lacks consistency!

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rontr
"This is cute, but doesn't really do anything which isn't already possible
with EC2 and S3."

EC2 doesn't give you durability, and S3 doesn't give you speed. SimpleDB gives
you both.

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wmf
It sounds like SimpleDB runs on EC2, meaning it can't do anything that you
couldn't build yourself on EC2. If you replicate data across enough EC2 nodes
you can get durability (at the cost of complexity and high MTTR).

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jsjenkins168
I like the focus on simplicity, but I'm not excited about writing a custom
framework to handle the new proprietary query language. I was hopeful a
service like this would accept standard SQL but this is not the case.

Eventual Consistency will require a complete re-thinking of how traditional
web apps persist data. This is a big problem. I'm just hopeful that it will
eventually be possible to guarantee that written data is immediately
accessible. Maybe by briefly buffering it in an external location until the
SimpleDB data is consistent? Yet more custom framework code to write..

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mechanical_fish
Don't forget the part where your brand-new custom framework needs to properly
serialize and deserialize each value based on its type. Because according to
this person: <http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/>

...Amazon's magical indexing technology is to make all searches
lexicographical. So you have to "zero-pad your integers, add positive offsets
to negative integer sets, and convert dates into something like ISO 8601". Or
something.

But at least you don't have to write one of those fiendishly difficult CREATE
TABLE statements! Ah, "simplicity"!

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charlie
<http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/>

~~~
sriram
I wrote up an overview post at
[http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2007/12/amazon-
simpledb-t...](http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2007/12/amazon-simpledb-
technical-overview.html)

The eventual consistency part is going to be interesting to watch.

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sanj
No joins!

I guess you have to take denormalization to heart!

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chrisconley
really!

somewhat disappointing but I suppose there's a reason for this

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inovica
This is great news. We have just started using EC2 and S3 for a startup I've
invested in and one of our concerns has been using mysql as it needs to be
used on an EC2 instance. We've been looking at ways to ensure our data is
safe, but this SimpleDB could provide the answer we've been looking for. Hope
I get into the beta! Out of interest, anyone else out there using mysql on EC2
and how have you dealt with ensuring your data is safe?

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mwerty
The last line:

> There's one significant cost that SimpleDB users can avoid: keeping a
> database administrator on the payroll.

cringe cringe cringe.

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bayareaguy
No, all it may do is change the DBA skill set a little. If your data wasn't
important enough for a DBA then you wouldn't have had a DBA anyways and
SimpleDB does nothing to change that.

Conversely, if your data matters enough to you then there will be a DBA
somewhere who knows the data well enough to ensure it survives.

Who are you going to call when your application corrupts your data? Amazon
probably won't lose your data on purpose but they can't prevent mistakes.

However, this could be an opportunity for an startup - outsourced SimpleDB
data administration.

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mwerty
Good points and all but the cringing was for the cliched way the article
ended.

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raghus
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342335011>

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DocSavage
SimpleDB appears to be Amazon's Dynamo opened up as a web service. There's
good technical information, including a paper, over here:
<http://allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html>

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codeslinger
ARRGH! Did no one actually read that paper? Its 1MB limit on data size and
concentration on HA for writes makes it unsuitable for this purpose, just as
it is unsuitable for S3 (a previous rumor purported by the commenters on this
site). RTFP, people!

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DocSavage
max 256 attribute-values per item. Max 1024 bytes per attribute value.

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chaostheory
I was interested until I read this: "Query execution time is currently limited
to 5 seconds."

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DarrenStuart
mmmm costs $1226.4 just to run without datacost being accounted for.

I love the idea but I feel the pricing should of been like s3 I.E just paying
for storage and bandwidth.

I can't see how you would get out a key from the system when you add a new
record...

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sadiq
That $0.14/hour is the amount of processing you do, not the hourly cost to use
the service.

$1226.4 is if you're hammering the data-base with intense queries 100% of the
time (so it's always being utilised).

In reality (though this depends on how efficient their database is) it'll
likely be orders of magnitude smaller.

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rms
So $.14/hour is for a full unit of processing for an hour? What's the smallest
amount of processing you can get?

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sadiq
"SimpleDB costs 14 cents per machine hour, with no minimum fee."

I guess we won't know the costs in reality until the service is up. It pretty
much all depends on how efficient their implementation is.

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DarrenStuart
so if you get one hit to the db per hour then you are going to end up paying
for it big time.

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sadiq
How exactly?

If a query takes 1ms, you're going to pay for one sixty-thousanth of $0.14 . I
fail to see what you're doing? Or am I missing something?

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DarrenStuart
I thought it was charged like this, if you use it once then the minimum amount
you will be charged is for an hours usage per hour.

but it could end up really expensive if you are hitting your database a lot.
100k users hitting a 2 second query per view ain't going to be cheap.

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tlrobinson
No.

 _Machine Utilization - $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed

Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges
based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular
request (QUERY, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa
2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor._

