What's the point of using Amazon SimpleDB?

Question

I thought that I could use SimpleDB to take care of the most challenging area of my application (as far as scaling goes) - twitter-like comments, but with location on top - till

Answer 1

I'm building a commericial .NET application which will use SimpleDB as its primary data store. I'm not yet in production, but I've also been building out an open-source library that addresses some of the issues with using SimpleDB vs an RDBS. Some of the features on my roadmap are related to the issues you've mentioned:

• Transparent partitioning of data
• Pseudo transactionality
• Transparent spanning of attributes to surpass the 1000 byte limit

SimpleDB is still under active development and will certainly end up with many features it doesn't have today (some added to the core system and some in the code libraries).

The .NET library is Simple Savant.