The release of Amazon's SimpleDB is another interesting step away from traditional relational databases towards data first - structure later storages, for example content repositories in various flavors. Michael Marth puts it all together and I would add Xenodot [pdf] from resting bird to the list, although it's not released yet.
One thing I miss in SimpleDB is the lack of a tree structure, ie. there is only one big set of items that are unconnected. This has the adavantage of making the implementation easily scalable as each item can be stored on a different machine and the rest is done by the search index. You could use URIs with paths as your item names to create a virtual tree structure (I don't know if long item names are feasible), but there is no way to easily explore your data and structure it with parent-child relationships explicitly.
The idea of creating a JCR-interface on top of SimpleDB is nice, but I wonder if a persistence manager for Jackrabbit would be enough. But a persistence manager could also use Amazon S3 directly.
Posted at 12:54PM Dec 21, 2007 by Alexander Klimetschek in JCR | Comments[0]