Programming Amazon Web Services

Domains

The SimpleDB service stores your data in one or more domains. Each domain is completely distinct; the items stored in one domain are separate from the items stored in other domains, and you cannot perform queries across domains. Depending on the nature and size of the data sets you are storing, you may choose to put all of your data in a single domain, or you may partition it out between multiple domains.

You can have up to 100 domains in one SimpleDB account, each of which must have a name that is unique within the account. Domains have a storage limit of 10 GB of data, including the overhead imposed by the service to store indexing information. There is also a 250 million attribute value limit within a domain.

Note

These particular domain limits may only apply during the beta phase of the SimpleDB service. Some of the limits may be increased or removed once the service has graduated from the beta phase.

Unlike the other infrastructure services provided by Amazon, the SimpleDB service provides no mechanism to allow other AWS users or the general public to access the data stored in your domains.

Create a Domain

The CreateDomain operation shown in Table 13-2 creates a new domain with the specified name. The domain’s name must be unique within your SimpleDB account. If you re-create a domain that already exists, the service will not return an error message but may still spend some time processing the request.

Warning

The CreateDomain operation is expensive in terms of both machine ...