I have heard that Amazon uses a key-value data store - that it does not use a traditional relational normalized db. Speaking as someone who only has used the traditional approach, how does this work? Don t you need to do the following?
select * from book where book_id = n
Or a:
select * from book where author_id = y
How can you build a site/app with so much data and so many relationships without a normalized db?
The Amazon.com architecture is very interesting. They moved to a service oriented architecture, if you look at all the different content areas on their site, each one is served by a different service. So there is a wish list service and a Related to Items You ve Viewed service, and Bestsellers service, Shopping cart service, etc.
Each of the services has its own set of requirements and features. The requirements include things like response time and availability. Internally each service is implemented using whatever database best suits the needs. The key value store is good for a shopping cart, because you never need to do:
select * from book where book_id = n
on a shopping cart.
One of the important things to realize is the enormous role that availability plays at Amazon scale. Consider that Amazon 2008 revenue was $19.166 billion. The total retail revenue from from the Amazon.com site may be more than $1000 per second during the day (it may be double that, for all I know, during peak hours. It could be 5 times that during peak holiday shopping). Think of the cost if the shopping cart service goes down for 3 minutes during peak usage. It is clear that the loss would be a large dollar value in abandon carts.
Using a key-value store doesn t mean embracing rampant data duplication, it means redesigning applications so the necessary data doesn t need sit all in one monolithic database.
Amazon is really more of a platform for applications than anything else. Here is a video of Amazon s CTO talking about just that.
You may want to start your research by checking out these Stack Overflow articles:
The Amazon datastore is offered to the public as SimpleDB, which is part of the Amazon Web Services.
Also note that Google offers a similar "sparse, distributed multi-dimensional sorted map" datastore for the Google App Engine.
It only uses its Dynamo key-value store for its shopping cart and select other applications.
Is there a way / tool to simulate Amazon s SimpleDB for the purpose of development? In my quest for above, I found this tool but this is for the Mac OS. Anything that can be installed on Win XP? ...
Anyone know how to do this - just what would be the equivalent to this: "select * from YOUR_TABLE order by rand() limit 1" in mysql?? Maybe not possible in SDB?
My site s architecture includes ASP.Net & MySQL. I am planning to deploy it on Amazon Cloud. This would mean EC2 instance(s) and RDS. My query is regarding logging. I m ensuring that my ...
I have heard that Amazon uses a key-value data store - that it does not use a traditional relational normalized db. Speaking as someone who only has used the traditional approach, how does this work? ...
Is there any Blogging software (preferably .Net based) that uses Amazon SimpleDB for persistence?
I m working on an application where data size and SQL queries are going to be heavy. I am thinking between Cassandra or Amazon SimpleDB. Can you please suggest which is more suitable in this kind of ...
Has anybody compared SimpleDB and Tokyo Cabinet for performance and scalability? I m coding my project against SimpleDB at the moment and considering benchmarking TC, be nice if somebody had already ...
I know how to page forward with SimpleDB data by using NextToken. However, how exactly does one handle previous pages? I m on .NET, but I don t think that matters. I m more interested in the ...