just published a new case study on Adaptive Blue's new Glue product. Taking the form of a Firefox plug-in, Glue allows users to share feedback with friends on books, music, movies, restaurants, gadgets, stocks and other everyday things around the web. In the case study, Adaptive Blue founder Alex Iskold recaps the line of reasoning which led him to use SimpleDB. Time to market was important, as was the ability to scale out to handle a growing user base, which now stands at around 100,000. Glue also makes use of EC2 for processing, and S3 for storage. In fact they are now storing over 30 million objects in S3.
Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access. This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.
Amazon Web Services Expertise
Authoring SimpleDB For Beginners
Leveraging his experience as a database development veteran and some recent work producing a SimpleDB backed Twitter solution our founder, Tyler Frieling, and co-author Kevin Marshall are pounding away at a useful tome to transfer their knowledge to others. The book should be published in the Fall of 2009 by Apress.
If you are thinking of using SimpleDB, need some guidance or just want to chat about the technology there are numerous channels to do so.
Twitter Connections
On Twitter Tyler can be reached or followed as tfrieling 
also a Twitter Stream has been created using the hashtag #simpleDBBook.
SimpleDB The Book's Webpage
We are in the process of building out a corresponding website to help the authors communicate changes, updates and discuss SimpleDB with the internet community. The website is located at www.SimpleDB.info.
Table of Contents
We are adjusting the contents of the book to correspond with the maturing technology and user's comments but the intial content is structured to cover these concepts and recipes:
1. Introduction. What is SimpleDB?
A. What it is, why it was built
B. Features and benefits of SimpleDB
C. Pros and Cons of selecting SimpleDB as your database (costs, availability, scalability, simplicity, maintenance, etc)
2. SimpleDB concepts and Design Decisions
A. Attribute/value data model (much like a spreadsheet)
i. Domains, Items, Attributes, and Values
B. SimpleDB vs. Relational DBMS
C. API overview (core methods and concepts/purpose for each method)
D. Authentication (getting access to the API via REST or SOAP)
E. Current API and account limit
3. Getting started with SimpleDB
A. Setting up an Account.
B. Choosing a technology (REST vs. SOAP)
C. Choosing a development language/platform
4. Your First Domain (basics of using SimpleDB via REST and SOAP)
A. Creating a domain
B. Inserting data
C. Selecting data
D. Updating data
E. Deleting data
5. Currently available SimpleDB libraries
A. Java
B. C#
C. Perl
D. PHP
E. VB.NET
6. Working with Domains
A. Creating a domain
B. Listing domains
C. Deleting a domain
7. Working with Items
A. Adding items to a domain
B. Searching and listing items
i. Intersections
ii. searching across multiple attributes
iii. sorting results
C. Updating items
D. Deleting an item
8. Working with Attributes
A. Defining attributes
B. Getting the attributes of an item
C. Replacing an attribute
D. Deleting an attribute
9. Working with Values
A. Adding values to an attribute
B. Listing values of an attribute
C. Updating values of an attribute
D. Deleting values from an attribute
10. Integrating your Amazon SimpleDB power with Amazon S3 data objects (building a quick and simple application that uses both SimpleDB and S3).
A. Setting up and accessing S3.
B. Designing the system to take advantage of the strengths of both SmipleDB and S3.
C. Building the sample.
11. Porting a simple relational database to SimpleDB
A. Mapping tables, rows, and columns to domains, attributes, and values.
B. Denormalization/duplication of data to optimize for searchability
C. Converting basic relational SQL queries to SimpleDB searche
12. Questions and Answers
A. What is the difference between Amazon SimpleDB and a traditional relational databases like Oracle, MS SQL, or MySQL?
B. When should I use Amazon S3 vs. Amazon SimpleDB?
C. What kind of data can I store?
D. How much data can I store?
E. Where is my data stored?
F. How much does Amazon SimpleDB cost?
G. How secure is my data?
H. What does Amazon do with my data in Amazon SimpleDB?
I. What happens if traffic from my application suddenly spikes?
13. Where to go for more information.
A. Documentation, Blogs, F.A.Q's, and other Amazon SimpleDB references.
What is SimpleDB?
Amazon SimpleDB is a web service providing the core database functions of data indexing and querying. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud, making web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.
SimpleDB Highlights
- Simple to use – Amazon SimpleDB provides streamlined access to the lookup and query functions that traditionally are achieved using a relational database cluster – while leaving out other complex, often-unused database operations. The service allows you to quickly add data and easily retrieve or edit that data through a simple set of API calls. Accessing these capabilities through the AWS cloud also eliminates the complexity of maintaining and scaling these operations in-house.
- Flexible – With Amazon SimpleDB, it is not necessary to pre-define all of the data formats you will need to store; simply add new attributes to your Amazon SimpleDB data set when needed, and the system will automatically index your data accordingly. The ability to store structured data without first defining a schema provides developers with greater flexibility when building applications, and eliminates the need to re-factor an entire database as those applications evolve.
- Scalable – Amazon SimpleDB allows you to easily scale-out your database processing as demand for your application grows. Horizontal scale-out, via the creation of new domains, allows you to easily respond to growth in both data volume and requests. For the Beta release, a single domain may grow to 10 GB and you are initially allocated a maximum of 100 domains; however, over time these allocations may be raised.
- Fast – Amazon SimpleDB provides quick, efficient storage and retrieval of your data to support high performance web applications. Applications running fully within the Amazon cloud (e.g. a SimpleDB request originating from an application running on Amazon EC2), will provide near-LAN latency.
- Reliable – The service runs within Amazon’s high-availability data centers to provide strong and consistent performance. To prevent data from being lost or becoming unavailable, your fully indexed data is stored redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.
- Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 and EC2, providing the infrastructure for creating web-scale applications. For example, developers can run their applications in Amazon EC2 and store their data objects in Amazon S3. Amazon SimpleDB can then be used to query the object metadata from within the application in Amazon EC2 and return pointers to the objects stored in Amazon S3.
- Inexpensive – Amazon SimpleDB passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay only for resources you actually consume. Compare this with the significant up-front expenditures traditionally required to obtain software licenses and purchase and maintain hardware, either in-house or hosted. This frees you from many of the complexities of capacity planning, transforms large capital expenditures into much smaller operating costs, and eliminates the need to over-buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.