Amazon have released their much-anticipated SimpleDB Web Service. There have long been whispers that such a service is on the cards, and I’ve been eager to find out some details. (Despite working at Amazon, I don’t get advance notice of this stuff!)
Data is stored on S3, as most people predicted it would be. This clearly isn’t a full relational database offering, and Amazon aren’t pretending it is. It’s a means of storing persistent data in domain tables, with a simple query syntax that looks quite unlike SQL and not much like the commonly used param=value web service syntax either. Here’s an example from the developer docs, to return rows from a specified domain table where price is less than 14.99 and color is blue:
['Price' < '14.99'] intersection ['Color' = 'Blue']
I can’t wait for SDB to go live, so that I can start playing with it and exploring the possibilities. More here soon!