Amazon made an interesting announcement of a new service called SimpleDB. (Click here to see the website.) The service allows an organization to rent a database online for transaction fees that are measured in pennies per gigabyte. This extends Amazons concept of providing Web based software tools so that developers can simply use infrastructure Amazon provides over the Web. This is often referred to as Cloud Computing and others like IBM are also investing heavily in the same concept. This is one of the movements that is quiet at first – only real geeks understand the value. Later, this will become a standard way of working for most businesses. If this seems complicated to you, let me reduce it to this simple thought. Whereas today organizations have to spend thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars buying servers, database software, storage drives, backup equipment and operating systems, in the future they will simply rent processing time. They will get more power, for less money, and automatic disaster recovery in the process. I love what Amazon is doing and am amazed that IBM is playing catch up.
A couple of interesting statistics for your neighborhood DBA:
- Attribute values are limited to 1,024 bytes; Amazon suggest that you store larger fields in S3 and use SimpleDB to query metadata about those objects.
- Pricing is $0.14 per “machine hour consumed,” and about the same per GB data transfer both in and out.
OK, so maybe that doesn’t mean much to you, but pass it on to the CIO and he or she will be impressed.
The interesting Website of the day: Yahoo! political dashboard. Click here to see the best recap of the race I have found.
Lastly, just for fun I have added the headline of the day for you. Check out this from AP. Since I mentioned IBM, I thought I would go further and share the following…
About 1 in 5 IBM employees now in India
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
Fri Dec 14, 4:43 PM ET BOSTON – IBM Corp.’s expansion in developing countries shows no sign of relenting. The technology company revealed Friday that it now has 73,000 employees in India, almost a 40 percent leap from last year.