Don't Forget: You Can Use Amazon SimpleDB For Free | Hacker News Reader

Don't Forget: You Can Use Amazon SimpleDB For Free

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76 pointsjeffbarr21 comments

I've had a descent amount of experience with SimpleDb and unfortunately I don't find it as good as what Amazon makes it out to be. The name "Simple" defines the service very well.

There are too many limitations which makes SimpleDb almost impossible to use for complex data storage. A few examples of annoying limitations:

1. SimpleDb is a Key to list value pair storage engine (e.g. Key = Name, Values = [John, George, Ringo, Paul]). Seems good but you can only have 256 values per record.

2. Each value is limited to 1024 characters (512 for double byte)

3. Where clauses of "select" statements are ordered by their ascii values. Makes things relatively complex numeric values. Here's some suggestions from amazon when working with numerical values.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimpleDB/2007-11-07/...

and floating points are especially annoying:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/691778/best-way-to-format...

Bottom line, my take is if you want to use SimpleDb for simple data storage, it's a wonderful service and relatively cost effective. If you're data is or will become complex then it's not the service for you. I'd look into Google App Engine for a robust and "free" service.

What you said is very true, and a good summary of shortcomings, but I'd like to note a real benefit it affords you despite these drawbacks.

While 3. is a pain-point in many systems, the fact that you can do selects with where clauses on a key-value store that scales horizontally is impressive. The indexing they do can be very helpful in certain implementations.

10 GB per domain isn't a hell of a lot of scaling.

True, it's no Cassandra :)

Anyway I think 10gb per domain is reasonable for many people, but it is another limit of the store that could cause problems. Fortunately Amazon knows the boundaries of SDB, so it can put these in place and help inform decisions about using it for, say, a project that will need more than 10gb per domain, or more than 100 domains.

FYI, with a 1k limit per item this translates into approx 10.5M items per domain max. That's a pretty big data set to have capacity for without having to shard across domains out of the box at unlimited read/write scalability.

Google App Engine's data store is also "simple" by your definition (unnecessarily limited). IIRC, it makes it very difficult to bulk download your entire database.

Has anyone had experience utilizing memcached with SimpleDB? Were there issues?

In terms of price, after the free quota is surpassed, does SimpleDB make sense for relatively small sites? i.e. sites with fewer than 200k uniques / month

If you don't throw too much traffic at it you will be fine using it as a memcached alternative, but you will probably notice the overhead of an HTTP transaction. It largely depends on what you are doing.

It seems like you are referring to using it as a cache only, and on those terms, it really depends on your traffic profile. Chances are, though, with 200k uniques you would be pleased. If you are running in EC2, the bandwidth is free, so you only pay for computation. That can keep things pretty inexpensive.

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That's a pretty substantial service to offer for free and it seems you can access it from Javascript too. I wonder if it would violate their terms of service to write an application where each user had their own Simple DB account?

This would be perfectly acceptable, come on in!

You would have to ask each new user to create an AWS account (also free) and then enter their credentials (public key and private key). If you are building a browser-based app you need to protect the credentials from prying eyes/code.

> If you are building a browser-based app you need to protect the credentials from prying eyes/code.

Isn't this the problem that oauth is intended to solve?

But having web users bring their own database is not the problem that AWS is trying to solve.

There are actually some backup services that leverage S3 and require customers to have their own accounts. It seems to work quite well as a model.

Could this be used as an alternative to the AWS Message Queue?

[Edit] Now that I am having a little coffee, I realize that you would have difficulty knowing what the keys are to the queued messages. I guess you could use a set of known keys, and cycle through them looking for messages, but why be a cheapskate.

Can you upload files to SimpleDB and use it as a free alternative to Amazon S3? I imagine not but I'm curious anyway.

The only way to achieve this would be to shard the file across multiple entries. The limit per is 1k, so I doubt it would fit your needs. There is also a hard limit of 1gb per domain, which is not difficult to run up against if you treat it as a more generic data store.

It figures - I wouldn't expect them to canabalize S3. Thanks for the details though.

if you are already paying for AWS, correct?

AWS products are pay as you go, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. This will be free until you cross the limit.

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