Thinking of AWS SimpleDB?

[mrwooster]

I am considering using AWS's SimpleDB instead of my current MySQL database.

My reasons for considering the change are:

My website is one in which the database is growing very large in size, very quickly.

Using SimpleDB will allow me to have a flexible and easily expanding database, paying for what I use at the current time.

Using SimpleDB allows me to have a database which is not part of my hosting provider, making changing hosting providers a more simple process.

Has anyone had any experience with SimpleDB, is it worth the change, and how does it compare to a locally hosted MySQL db?

Also, I am slightly confused as to what AWS means by 'machine hours'? It says that the first 25 'machine hours' per month are free.... is a machine hour using the database for 1 hour? In which case you would incur 24 machine hours per day, every day? Or is it a measure of the usage of the database? So you might only use 20 machine hours in a month?

Ty

[Dan Grossman]

Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (SELECT, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor.

It's an abstraction. If you're not handling any queries at midnight, then you're not paying for any machine hours. If you're handling more than a 1.7GHz processor could handle per hour in the afternoon, you'll be paying more than one machine hour per real hour.

SimpleDB is not the same kind of relational database you're used to with MySQL. It does not have the same structured data and does not support the same kinds of queries. Your first step should be establishing whether it will even work for your application. If so, expect to rewrite your entire data layer.

A much simpler transition would be to move your MySQL servers onto Amazon EC2 instances and using Amazon Elastic Block Storage for storage. You can continue using MySQL and have unlimited disk space.

[mrwooster]

A much simpler transition would be to move your MySQL servers onto Amazon EC2 instances and using Amazon Elastic Block Storage for storage. You can continue using MySQL and have unlimited disk space.

Wow... such a simple idea... definitely the better option. Thanks for the help.

Ty