Cloud Computing Info

Yep, looks like Amazon finally clued in to the fact that SimpleDB is pretty much useless for any mission critical work. They’ve added a new web services, Relational Database Service, abbreviated RDS.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.
Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database.

SimpleDB

SimpleDB was Amazon’s first available (in beta) web service. It is a neat feature but it has its downsides. First, SimpleDB is not a relational database. It is a name/value key pair. For simple lookups, it is highly reliable and scalable. For anything more complicated, it falls apart.

SimpleDB is not ACID compliant and has not referential integrity. For that matter, it has not schemas, tables or relationships. Amazon says that it “eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling”. Some things make me say, “Hmmmmm.”

SimpleDB structures data somewhat like a spreadsheet. Think of columns across and values down.

Need a database in your cloud? Check out CouchDB.

What is CouchDB?

CouchDB is an Apache project. CouchDB is not a relational database. It seems that cloud computing has spawned, or at least made popular, a new breed of database. Rather than the hierarchical, network or relational databases of yore*, we have a new paradigm: key/value pairs. You declare a field and assign some values.

*I left object database and xml database off my database of yore list as they never really caught on.

SimpleDB is another key/value database that you may have heard of or used. SimpleDB is provided as part of Amazon Web Services (AWS).