Amazon SimpleDB is on its way and it may just change how you use databases with your web applications (or even desktop apps). SimpleDB is a web service that leverages Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 to store, process and query datasets. Currently most if not all of us use a RDBMS such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL or PostgreSQL to store our data, but that requires hardware and most of the time a DBA to administer database.
Can you imagine a spatial component to Amazon SimpleDB and how you’d integrate it with your workflows? My spine is tingling just thinking about the possibilities.
You can learn more about the details of SimpleDB here.
Update: The more I think about this, the more I realize how disruptive SimpleDB will be. It was designed to be used with web applications and will be able to scale with them easily. You just can’t do that on your own. I was writing about AWS back in June and how its ability to scale could help users provide services that only the largest companies can afford.