Amazon's SimpleDB - Nice concept that took time for me to grasp!!

I was reading this news about SimpleDB all over the technology news and blogosphere, yesterday.

So I opened couple of links given below including Amazon's SimpleDB announcement.
- Amazon.com: Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Web Services
- inside looking out » What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB
- Amazon SimpleDB 101 & Why It Matters - GigaOM

It was really tough for me to understand what SimpleDB was all about. All I knew about Amazon was that it was a great online book store which has spread into other areas of online shopping. And more recently, I know Amazon for Kindle - their e-reader. By the way, here is one more latest review about Kindle. Probably, this mindset about Amazon was the reason why I could not understand (digest) the fact about SimpleDb.

You might consider me to be stupid and dumbfor having read the above links at least 4-5 times (except for the Amazon's web page where they explained about SimpleDB. I should have read that first) and then I slowly came to realize that SimpleDB was a web service which is available for you (or your company) to create, store, update and handle a database online.

Basically, you would setup an RDBMS such as Oracle and then have a web interface to update the database (backend).

What Amazon promises is that they seem to have all the storage and database related logic distributed over a network of servers (concept known as cloud-computing). If you are an organization, then you are readily use this web service for your database/backend requirements. The cost as Amazon claims is very nominal. Refer to their SimpleDB page for details of the cost.

You should probably read this article in CNet News about SimpleDB, which is more down to earth and is for non-geeky folks.

From the above article is when I came to know that wordpress.com actually uses SimpleDB as their backend. This is like a eye opener.

Look at the possibilities that it opens up for a startup which wants a reliable and fast backend.

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I have been allergic to the DBMB/RDBMS and I have been particularly allergic to the word "Oracle". The main reason for this is that during my student days, the way concepts of DB and RDBMS were taught was horrifying and I started hating the subject.

But during my work years, I realized that I do like database concepts and I have designed a few decent DB schemas using MS-Access and given it a web interface. I had come up with simple tools such as bug tracker. Not bad for a guy who hated concepts of DB so much.. i tell myself.

Wordpress's mobile phone optimized web interface

I am so relieved to find that wordpress provides a web interface optimized for mobile phones. I dont remember wordpress supporting this earlier.

Mobile blogging has always been a pain for me earlier and to some extent even now. Blogger, for instance, provides a mail based posting of blogs. You can mail your post by mailing it to a predefined mail address (thats how I am posting this message). But its not very covenient though. I need to open my mail client to post the message and also formatting on the posted message looks bad. Also, it does not provide a way to tag the message and also does not provide me with a dashboard.

Web service providers seem to vastly underestimate the need for a mobile phone optimized web interface. The whole world is moving towards mobile computing and web service providers better realize this.. For their own good.

Tale of my two blogs - Blogger and Wordpress

As you would have read the "About me", you would have noticed that i have mentioned a blog mirror (http://mohasin.wordpress.com/) where all the post that I write here get mirrored on to my other blog in wordpress.

I have been having using this blog in wordpress for quite sometime. Wordpress has been my favorite blog site and I had started blogging actively in wordpress ever since blogspot was blocked by Indian government(temporarily for few weeks - its okay now) sometime last year. I had no other option other than search for someother blog site where i can continue blogging. So I started comparing features of different blog sites and I found wordpress to be more appealing. Wordpress had some features which blogspot didn't have at that point of time. For example, you could not label/categorize the posts in the older version of blogspot, but wordpress allowed the same. Why, even now, wordpress allows you to import post from other blog sites. I could not find such a feature in blogspot currently.

Though i was happy blogging in wordpress, I again had a problem which irritated me a lot. The wordpress blogs were blocked from the company firewall. It was a big deal for me because I could not save my thoughts during my office hours.

Now thats when I again thought of an idea (using the import feature in wordpress). Blogspot was not blocked in the company firewall. So that gave me an idea. I will again start blogging in blogspot and frequently import those blogs into wordpress. The import feature in wordpress works intelligently. It imports only those blogs which were not imported previously.

This way, I have been retaining my wordpress blog. Wirting the blogs in blogspot and then importing them in wordpress :).

I see that in the newer version of blogger.com, lot of features have been added and I am beginning to like blogspot as well. I just wish that folks at Google could add a feature to import blogs from wordpress. That way, when I make a change in wordpress blog, I could import those changes in blogspot. That would allow me to keep both my blogs (blogspot and wordpress) in sync.