And the Beatdown Goes On

Reg Developer has an article titled 'Backlash starts against 'sexy' databases.' Ryan Park had a great writeup of 'Top 10 Reasons to Avoid the SimpleDB Hype.'

I don't think of SimpleDB as sexy, but it and other directory-service-esque-data-repositories are still being hyped. The article discusses how the relational nerds are defending our ground... Ok, that makes it sound better than it is; but the article is worth reading.

Of course, I am not surprised by any of this.

Tags: simpledb

More on SimpleDB

I am still wound up over SimpleDB. It appears that others are starting to realize what is actually being offered.

Tim Anderson is not jaded. He looks at the pros and cons here.

Marcelo Calbucci gets it--I wish I had found this before I did my initial writeup.

Fec is remaining skeptical like me.

Scott Yang expresses reservations.

Amazon's SimpleDB

Amazon is entering the DBMS market... With a non-DBMS?

Let's look at the article found at http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2007/12/a-place-for-eve.html.

"Amazon SimpleDB makes it really easy and straightforward to store and to retrieve structured data. You no longer need to worry about creating, maintaining, or migrating database schemas, monitoring and tuning the performance of your queries, outgrowing the storage or processing capacity of your database server, making backups, or replicating data."

Already I am confused... 'retrieve structured data,' 'no longer need to worry about creating... database schemas.' But... structured data... schema... structure... schema... Do you see my confusion? Let's read on...

"Instead you simply create up to 100 SimpleDB domains (each of which can hold up to 10 GB of data, for a total of 1 TB) and then start to store structured data in the form of items."

So, create a database and put some tables in it? 'Item' is a very vague term. 'Domain' has a few meanings in the IT world, and a very specific meaning in the database world. But everyone brands their own terminology...

"Each item consists of multiple name/value pairs (which we call attributes)"

Novel idea.

"With SimpleDB there is no need for a time-consuming schema change when you need to store additional information in your database. You simply store the additional attributes as desired."

So domain became database. And we are adding columns where desired. How is this not maintaining a schema? More accurately, this is what programmers often do when there isn't a DBA around to smack their wrists... So again, I fail to see any innovation.

"For example, if you were building a tag cloud to represent information about a collection of web sites, you could store the site URL as the first attribute and the entire set of tags as the second."

So it has object oriented capabilities? Cool! There are people that would really like to see that functionality.

"After the system has been running for a while, you decide to add a thumbnail for each URL (of course the Alexa Site Thumbnail Service would be perfect for this) and simply add a third attribute to the new entries. Later, as desired, you can go back and add this attribute to the older entries. This ability to improve your data model on a dynamic, as-needed basis makes Amazon SimpleDB a perfect match for today's fast-paced world of agile development, where flexibility and adaptability are of paramount importance."

ALTER TABLE.

"Applications which require long-running queries and/or complex table joins, such as those for data warehouse applications, are probably not a good fit for SimpleDB today. While RDBMS offerings provide deep functionality, for many use cases, they introduce more complexity (and more cost) than is necessary. Many developers simply want to store, process, and query their data without worrying about managing schemas, maintaining indexes, tuning performance or scaling access to their data."

This sounds like data management, '80s style.

I love Amazon. I think that they are a great company with incredible customer service. It took them years to get in the black and I rooted for them the whole way. Even this nonsense does not turn me off to them. However, I do hope that they revisit their presentation. There are many many reasons why the relational model is better than flat-file and hierarchical models. Dismissing the relational model, RDBMSes and DBAs as by and large unneccessary is ludicrous. Especially when you can't even get away from the basic concepts and terminology in your 'solution.' I also doubt that SimpleDB will be able to scale very large while remaining cost effective--it is simple, after all.

After glancing at links referenced at the bottom of the article, particularly the FAQ, this really does not sound like a bad product for what it is intended to do (or at least how I could see it practically being used (it is a redundant, affordable directory service for data; which has great potential for web applications). How they are billing it though is rather ridiculous. I really hope that I have completely misunderstood this and/or this will have a positive impact on the data management world.