Monday, December 17, 2007

Amazon SDS - Simple Database Design

This new product from Amazon poises thought provoking ideas regarding database design. It goes away from a schema based on normalization, joins, and stored procedures; and focuses primarily on speed and small message size.


Here are some principles of the Simple DB. Could we build an application on top of such a model?

  • All data elements are automatically indexed as UTF strings
  • Organized like a hash table (key - value pairs), characterized as "hash in the cloud" or library (Do you know what a hash table is?)
  • Execution time is limited to 5 seconds (processing is moved from the database to the application)
  • Objects are comprised of a Domain/Item/Attribute hierarchy.
  • Each Item can have 256 attribute values
  • Each Attribute can range from 1 to 1,024 bytes


While this schema would necessitate a major shift in schema design, it seems that forcing the processing from the database to the application may move in the right direction.

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