Amazon.com has announced the limited beta release of the newest edition to their ever growing family of web services, SimpleDB. SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. With the scale and functionality of a clustered relational database, SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results.

Unlike traditional databases, Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema. The schema defines the structure of the database, using fields names, data type, size, etc. SimpleDB is structured more like a spreadsheet. Data is stored as “items”. “Items are like rows of data, attributes are like column headers, and values are the data entered in each of the cells. However unlike a spreadsheet, Amazon SimpleDB allows for multiple values to be associated with each “cell”. ”

SimpleDB allows you to implement writing, index and query data using a simple API. Below are some API examples:

CreateDomain – Create a domain that contains your dataset.

DeleteDomain – Delete a domain.

ListDomains – List all domains and associated metadata.

PutAttributes – Add or update an item and its attributes, or add attribute-value pairs to items that exist already. Items are automatically indexed as they are received.

GetAttributes – Retrieve an item and all or a subset of its attributes and values.

DeleteAttributes – Delete an item, an attribute, or an attribute value.

Query – Query the dataset using a query expression which specifies value tests on one or more attributes. Supported value tests are: =, !=, <, > <=, >=, starts-with. Example: ["price" < "12.00"] AND ["color" = "green"]

SimpleDB’s pricing is as follows:

Machine Utilization – $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed

Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (QUERY, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor.

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB
Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SimpleDB. Data transferred between Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).
Structured Data Storage – $1.50 per GB-month