PacktLib: Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide

Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide

Credits

Foreword

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

Preface

Getting to Know SimpleDB

Experimenting with SimpleDB

How does SimpleDB work?

How do I interact with SimpleDB?

How is SimpleDB priced?

Why should I use SimpleDB?

Summary

Getting Started with SimpleDB

Creating an AWS account

Enabling SimpleDB service for AWS account

Query API and authentication

SimpleDB libraries

SDBtool — Firefox plugin

Sample outline — performing basic operations

Basic operations with Java

Basic operations with PHP

Basic operations with Python

Summary

SimpleDB versus RDBMS

No normalization

No joins

No schemas

Simpler SQL

Only strings

Eventual consistency

Scalability

Low maintenance

Advantages of the SimpleDB model

Disadvantages of the SimpleDB model

Summary

The SimpleDB Data Model

Domains

Exploring the metadata for a domain and costs

Items

Attributes

Values

Consistent Read and Conditional Put / Delete announcement

Summary

Data Types

What is lexicographical comparison?

Storing numeric values

Storing date values

Storing Boolean values

XML-restricted characters

Summary

Querying

Sample data

Comparison operators

Queries with Select

Combining expressions

Sorting

Counting the results

Queries on multi-valued attributes

Querying for multi-valued attributes

Summary

Storing Data on S3

Amazon S3

Pricing for S3

Plan of action

Summary

Tuning and Usage Costs

BoxUsage

Partitioning

Summary

Caching

Caching

Memcached

Memcached and security

Installing memcached

Installing memcached client

Storing and retrieving data from memcached

Cache_Lite

Logic flow for using caching with SimpleDB

Summary

Parallel Processing

BatchPutAttributes

Serialized SimpleDB requests

Parallelizing SimpleDB requests

Concurrency and SimpleDB

Summary