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"!
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..