Posts Tagged: database

General — View Comments
27
Oct 09

Amazon launches MySQL in the cloud

 logo_awsAmazon has launched Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), as part of its AWS offering.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.

Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

Similar to its EC2 service, you have to launch an RDS instance, which costs between $0.11-$3.10 an hour (depending on the number of dedicated cores and memory you need — from 1 core with 1.7GB of memory up to 8 cores with 68GB of memory).

It would have been nicer if Amazon would have launched this as pay-for-what-you-use service, similar to its other SimpleDB and S3 offerings.

Main — View Comments
1
Mar 09

Some more evidence that the hashtable is the database

Pro:

Con:

Main — View Comments
14
Jan 09

The project that shall not be named

voldemortProject Voldemort is an open source implementation of parts of Amazon’s Dynamo (on top of which Amazon built various of its AWS web services, such as S3). It’s a database in its most basic form: (key, value) pairs. Which reminds me of a visitor we once had in our group. He visited because he developed software that generated code (which is what we do research on). It turned out that he used PHP to generate HTML code, which is hardly ground breaking. Nevertheless, he had an interesting view on database design: “all this normalization and column type stuff in database seems pointless to me,” he said. “In the end, all you need is strings. That’s why all columns in my tables are of type string with a fixed column width.” Looking at current developements, this statement could almost be seen as prophetic. The database 2.0 that starts to emerge indeed seems to move back to denormalized tables and String column types. Look at Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB and you’ll see what I mean.

But I digress. The key, value pairs in Voldemort are automatically distributed over multiple server to make the system scale. Voldemort is used by a little site called LinkedIn that you may know. Why I care? Because Harry Potter is cool and Voldemort is a kick-ass name for a software project.