http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ With all the other options available, I'd like to hear some stories. What types of things is it good for? Why not just MySQL?
Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#2Also, when they mention "high availability", does that mean it's fast? Or that it doesn't go down? They do mention that from ec2 instances, the speed is "near-LAN", whatever that means in practice.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#3Also, when they mention "high availability", does that mean it's fast? Or that it doesn't go down? They do mention that from ec2 instances, the speed is "near-LAN", whatever that means in practice.
'High availability' means that it doesn't go down - or at least is much less likely to than a non-HA system.
It's not really to do with being 'fast' per se, although sufficiently slow response times are indistinguishable from downtime.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#4I use it, it's expensive and slow and hard to develop for, but it never goes down or causes operational headaches
You must pair it with an in memory cache, even then it's still slow and expensive
I'd still recommend it though for some use cases
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#5I use it, it's expensive and slow and hard to develop for, but it never goes down or causes operational headaches You must pair it with an in memory cache, even then it's still slow and expensive I'd still recommend it though for some use cases
So it's slow and needs memcached or something? That's dissapointing. What usecases would you use it for?
Never going down just doesn't seem that big of a deal for me, their aws mysql service also "never" goes down, so I might as well use that and gain all the sql advantages, right?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#6GetGlue apparently stores much of their data in SDB. CEO (Alex Iskold) talked about it in TWiST #78:
http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-start...
Netflix is also migrating to SimpleDB from Oracle: http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/10/22/paper-netflixs-tr...
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#7I use it, it's expensive and slow and hard to develop for, but it never goes down or causes operational headaches You must pair it with an in memory cache, even then it's still slow and expensive I'd still recommend it though for some use cases
So it's slow and needs memcached or something? That's dissapointing. What usecases would you use it for? Never going down just doesn't seem that big of a deal for me, their aws mysql service also "never" goes down, so I might as well use that and gain all the sql advantages, right?
Never going down in a database doesn't just mean that it doesn't have downtime, it also means that as a whole system it's immune to bad queries.
Bad queries can destroy you in MySQL, if you are doing dynamically created queries that hit un-optimized areas, it can bring down all the other queries too.
I'd typically use Memcache with MySQL too, so there isn't any real difference in that case.
One use case I like SimpleDb for is for small scripts that need a very simple data store.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#8We tried using SimpleDB initially for a startup. We store a lot of numerical data. When it came time to actually query this data and do anything meaningful with it we ran into a lot of issues because all values are stored as untyped strings (comparison and ordering is always lexicographic). There are ways around this using zero-padding, but they are ugly and difficult. The SimpleDB query language is also limiting if you are accustomed to SQL and relational data structures. In the end it just wasn't the right fit and we reverted to an RDBMS.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#9I have used SimpleDB and wrote some basic Scala bindings for it:
http://github.com/crawshaw/saws
No service outages yet, but response time rarely drops below 50ms (from an EC2 instance) and there is a serious long tail on queries. I have seen 10 minute windows in which the fastest response time was 500ms. That is amazingly slow.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone using SimpleDB?
#10We use it as a subscription table for a constantly running process that pulls reports from search engine APIs (paid search data from google, for example).
Each SimpleDB Item represents an account for which we want search engine reports. The Item contains all the pieces necessary to tailor the API request for a specific account. When we need data for new accounts we just add them as new Items to SimpleDB, and the reports are picked up in the next run.
Cheap, available to any EC2 instance, and we never have to worry about DB maintenance or failures.