Amazon SimpleDB Batched PUTs Usage and Performance - One of the most important factors in getting optimal performance out of Amazon's SimpleDB is keeping the total number of requests to a minimum and making the most out of the ones you make. At one time this was tricky from a write perspective because only a single item could be updated in a PUT operation. Last spring Amazon eased the pain a little by allowing us to batch PUT operations into a single command. In order to demonstrate the use of this feature and analyze its performance I'll use C# and Amazon's .Net SimpleDB library. Single PUTs To establish a baseline I'm going to run a test with some sample data (Sun Micro's stock data from 1/3/05 to 7/9/2009 obtained from Yahoo! finance) and write it into a "StockPrices" domain...
Accessing SimpleDB from SSRS - Largely for my own amusement recently I became interested in the idea of accessing Amazon's SimpleDB from SQL Server Reporting Services. After searching around the web for a while I realized the only solution I'd be happy with was to write my own data processing extension for SSRS that can access SimpleDB. For those of you not familiar with SSRS data processing extensions they're simply libraries that teach reporting services how to talk to data sources. They merely require you to implement a few interfaces such as IDbCommand, IDbConnection and IDataReader from Microsoft.ReportingServices.DataProcessing. A great introduction to developing these extensions can be found here. After a few days of work I got a decent start on a library written in C# 2008 named SimpleDBExtension that I've published here on CodePlex. At...
My Tool List - One of the more popular thing's Scott Hanselman has done is maintain a tool List, essentially a list of applications and utilities that he's found useful. There are plenty of absolute gems in his list and rather than present my own I'd be very comfortable just pointing you to his... But what fun would that be? None! I also think there are a few more that I can add that are relevant to my personal experience. The list is rather short and there's a bit of overlap with Scott's but if all goes as planned I'll expand it over time as old useful tools come to mind or I discover new ones. Cloud iAWSManager - This is an iPhone app that lets you manage many of the functions of Amazon Web...
Home-Brewing a Full-Text Search in Google's AppEngine - I've recently deployed a django application on Google's AppEngine. I'm not sure how I've avoided it thus far but seems to fit my needs relatively well. DataStore (AppEngine's data storage engine) really impressed me. The python API feels so much like django's ORM that there was practically zero learning curve for a chap like me. One thing that disappointed me, however, was the state of the search facility. The built-in google.appengine.ext.search.SearchableModel suffers from many problems outlined all over the web. i.e. the need to create n indexes to handle for n search terms, index creation failures, inability to exclude properties and a lack of support for common search operations. A brief web search for alternatives turned up a semi-commercial product and a few open source offerings but nothing that really piqued...
