Daniel Chalef

Data in the Cloud

Amazon have announced the next piece of the puzzle for enterprise application cloud computing: Amazon SimpleDB, the database in the cloud. SimpleDB is a quasi-relational database accessed via web services. You can grow your datamodel and data on the fly without worrying about indexing, storage capacity etc. All the underlying infrastructure is taken care of by Amazon.

We’ve had the ability to store Binary Large Object (BLOB) data for some time in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. SimpleDB is a significant piece in the enterprise cloud computing puzzle as it provides a persistent, addressable storage medium for non-BLOB data.

While SimpleDB has great potential, the beta has limitations on the number of domains, size of domain datasets and maximum query time. We can’t yet port KnowledgeTree to SimpleDB and our MySQL clustering technology will still be around for a while yet. We will however most certainly continue building out KnowledgeTreeLive’s (our on-demand/SaaS document management software) management, clustering and potentially “self-healing” capabilities using SimpleDB. We’ve been lucky to be invited to the closed beta and will be starting to muck around with SimpleDB over the next few days.