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Other than the monetary aspects, how different is Amazon’s SimpleDB from Apache’s CouchDB in the following terms
I’m a fairly heavy SimpleDB user (I’m the developer of http://www.backupsdb.com/) but am currently migrating some projects off SimpleDB and into Couch, so I guess I can see this from both sides now.
1. Interfacing with programming languages like Java, C++ etc
Easier with Couch as you can talk to it very easily using JSON. SimpleDB is a bit more work, largely due to the complexities of signing each request for security and the lower level access you get which requires you to implement exponential back off in the case of busy signals etc. You can get good libraries for SimpleDB though in many languages now and this takes the pain away in many respects.
2. Performance and Scalability
I don’t have any benchmarks, but for my own use case, CouchDB outperforms SimpleDB. It’s harder to scale though – SimpleDB is great at that, you chuck more at it and it autoscales around you.
There are lots of occasionally irritating limits in SimpleDB though, limits on the number of attributes, size of attributes, number of domains etc. The main annoyance for many applications is the attribute size limit which means you can’t store large forum posts for example. The workaround is to offload those into something else such as S3, but it’s a bit annoying at times. Obviously CouchDB doesn’t have that issue and indeed the fact that you can attach large files to documents is one thing that particularly attracts me to it.
Scaling wise, you should also possibly be looking at bigcouch which gives you a distributed cluster and is closer to what you get with SDB.
3. Installation and Maintenance
I actually found it much easier with CouchDB. I suspect it depends on which library you need to use for SimpleDB, but when I was starting with it, the Amazon supplied libraries weren’t very mature and the open source community ones had various issues that meant getting up and running and doing something serious with it took more time than I would have liked. I suspect this is much better now.
CouchDB was surprisingly easy to install and I love the web interface to it. Indeed that would be my major criticism of SimpleDB – Amazon still don’t have any form of web console for it despite having web consoles for almost every other service. That’s why we wrote the very basic BackupSDB just so we could extract data in XML and run queries from a web browser, I’d like to have seen Amazon do something similar (but more powerful and better) by now and have been very surprised that they haven’t. There are lots of third party firefox plugins and some applications for it though but I have the impression that SimpleDB isn’t that widely used – this is only a hunch really.
4. Other Observations
The biggest issue I think is that with SimpleDB you are entrusting all your data to a third party with no easy way of getting it out (you’ll need to write something to do that), plus your costs keep gently rising. When you get to the point that the cost is comparable to a powerful dedicated database server, you kind of feel you’d get better value that way, but the migration headache is non trivial by this point as you’ll have a large commitment to the cloud.
I started off as a huge Amazon evangelist, and for most things I still am, but when it comes to SDB, I feel it’s a bit of a hobby project for Amazon the way the Apple TV was for Steve jobs.