firepoet writes "Amazon has released a new web-services based storage engine that looks an awful lot like a directory service: SimpleDB. While not supporting SQL per se, they offer several simple operations — CREATE: to make a new domain. GET, PUT, DELETE: to manipulate your domain. QUERY: to find things within the domain. Data is stored in cells that contain multiple attributes. A single attribute may contain multiple values. For example: (name, bob), (favoriteFruit, apple), (favoriteFruit, banana). Another interesting tidbit is the cost structure; you pay for how much data you store, how much you transfer, and how much CPU time the database uses while manipulating your data. 'Amazon SimpleDB is designed to store relatively small amounts of data and is optimized for fast data access and flexibility in how that data is expressed.'"

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