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!
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).
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..
...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"!
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
IMO it doesn't make sense for SimpleDB to be billed like EC2. An EC2 instance is using resources even when it's idle, so Amazon has to bill for that. Because SimpleDB is (presumably) fine-grained multi-tenant, it should only bill for the time consumed by query execution. It would have been clearer if Amazon priced it at 0.0000000388 dollars per millisecond or something, but then people might scratch their heads over rounding errors.
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!