Amazon offers SimpleDB - for-pay web data storage

firepoet writes: "Amazon has released a new web-services based storage engine that looks an awful lot like a directory service: SimpleDB. While not supporting SQL per se, they offer several Simple operations:

• CREATE — to make a new domain,
• GET, PUT, DELETE — to manipulate your domain, and
• QUERY — to find things within the domain

Data is stored in cells, that contain multiple attributes. A single attribute may contain multiple values, for example: (name, bob), (favoriteFruit, apple), (favoriteFruit, banana).

Another interesting tidbit is the cost structure — you pay for how much data you store, how much you transfer, and how much CPU the database uses while manipulating your data. While I'm not convinced it'd be practical for systems that store lots of data and manipulate it constantly, one might imagine small apps that can cache their data effectively taking advantage of the service."