Explore your Amazon SimpleDB with Bolso

I”m proud to announce the availability of Bolso, a utility I created to explore the Amazon SimpleDB.

Although Amazon.com’s SimpleDB is still in limited beta testing it looks to garner wide usage as an alternative to more traditional SQL databases. Of course it’s not a one size fits all solution, for certain applications it can dramatically reduce development time as well as eliminate the maintenance costs in managing and maintaining a SQL database.

When I started looking into its features and working with it, the Amazon SimpleDB reminded me a lot of object databases I’ve worked with in the past. It’s always been more intuitive for me to think of my objects as objects rather than rows and tables. Of course for a person with a strong SQL background rows and tables are second natrue, but I come from an object oriented programming background.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the Amazon SimpleDB service, it’s true to its name. It’s a simple database service from Amazon.com. Objects are organized into ‘domains’ which are analogous to a table in the SQL world. Each domain contains some number of items which are analogous to rows. Each item is made up of attribute-value pairs of data. Each attribute name would be like a column.

Although switching one’s thought process away from rows and tables to objects of attribute-value pairs might at first be a little difficult. One quickly becomes accustomed to thinking of their objects as objects floating around in a giant cloud repository.

The Amazon SimpleDB service makes it easy to store a lot of small objects that are easy to get and put. There is even a query API to retrieve objects according to certain criteria. In addition, the items in a given domain need not have the same format so you could put objects representing sweaters and Amazon SimpleDB was designed to offer fast response times so it’s meant to store lots of small objects rather than large amounts of data. Large amounts of data are better stored in Amazon.com’s S3 service. The Amazon SimpleDB makes a great compliment to Amazon’s S3 service because it can store meta data which can be queried and can point to larger data files stored in Amazon.com’s S3 service.

One difficulty with object databases that I’ve worked with is the ability to visualize the data I’ve inserted and/or see it to make sure it’s really there. So I began work on a utility called Bolso to see the contents of Amazon SimpleDB. As of this writing it has only basic functionality: adding/removing/editing domains,items, and item attributes. However I have in mind several other features that I think will be very useful.

I created Bolso using the Adobe AIR framework so I’m attempting to offer a utility with a rich user interface. I think the AIR platform will allow for some very interesting and useful features which I will add as time goes on. I’m eager to continue development on this project and I hope others out there will find the utility useful in exploring their Amazon SimpleDB repositories while they work on their own applications utilizing Amazon.com’s very cool SimpleDB service.

Head over to the Bolso website and give it a spin.