SimpleDB as the main database, examples.

Question

Please, can you give examples of real-life implementations using SimpleDB as the main persistent storage?

Answer 1

Why not start with Amazon's case studies?

Answer 2

I'm using SimpleDB for a project now but it isn't in production yet. We use it together with S3 to form our persistence layer. Entities are stored as JSON encoded documents in S3 (with memcached in front as a write-through cache). Metadata we want to query on is stored in SimpleDB.

This combination is working very well. Using a document based model allows us to have arbitrarily large entities. The limitations of SimpleDB are less painful if you use it strictly as an index.

The big lightbulb moment for me came when I stopped trying to think of SimpleDB as a drop-in replacement for a RDBMS. The combo with S3 is quite good.

Hope that's helpful.

Answer 3

I'm using SimpleDB as the main structured data store for GridRoom, a sports video sharing and collaboration service currently in beta.

I created Simple Savant, an open-source object persistence framework written in C#, to make this easier for myself. Aside from the initial work involved in creating the Savant framework itself, using SimpleDB means I spend about 1% of my time working on and supporting the data tier vs, say, 15% with SQL Server or another RDBMS.

There are still gaps in the administration and reporting tools that might make it difficult to justify moving an existing application over to SimpleDB for a couple more years, but for a new application I've found it to be a great choice.