Amazon Web Services Team just released an important new feature for Amazon SimpleDB. The new BatchPutAttributes function allows you to create or update up to 25 SimpleDB items at a time, in transactional fashion.

This new call is more efficient than a series of individual PutAttribute calls since one call incurs far less connection latency than a series of 25 calls. This new feature is available today and you can read about it here.

Also, based on feedback from the SimpleDB user community, they have increased the limit on the number of items per domain from 250 million to 1 billion.

Cloudfork AWS is a new open source project that provides easy access from Smalltalk to the Amazon Web Services that are related to cloud computing. The following services are supported: SimpleDB, SQS, S3.

The code is hosted on Squeaksource. The plan is to port Cloudfork AWS to other Smalltalk dialects as soon as the code is reasonably stable. The goal of the Cloudfork AWS project is simply to make the API’s easily usable from Smalltalk. 

Here’s the official blog of the project.

From the amazon web services blog:

You are invited to join the Amazon SimpleDB team on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 9am PST for the first session of our new Developers’ Forum. During these once monthly webinars, developers will hear from the technical experts behind SimpleDB, and have the opportunity to engage in live Q&A.

Interested developers may register by emailing simpledb-developer-forum@amazon.com. Please include name & AWS account ID. In addition, developers are encouraged to pre-submit any questions they may have, to allow for a more thorough response during the live webinar. For those struggling with the development of a new application, sample code and a description of the intended application may also be submitted for review and discussion.

The team is looking forward to speaking with developers on the 20th.

It should be interesting, no matter if you’re azure or aws. I don’t get it why you need an amazon aws account id to participate though.

Amazon SimpleDB gets easier and easier to use. And more powerful. It is now easy to write simple SQL like statements for your table (domain). Of course, there are changes and additions to the language in order to accomodate SimpleDB’s unique multi-valued attribute model.

Here’s what you can do:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = 'John' OR name LIKE 'Mark%'
SELECT * FROM users WHERE name NOT LIKE '%John%'

Attribute values must be quoted with a single or double quote. If a quote appears within the attribute value, it must be escaped with the same quote symbol (e.g., ‘You ain’’t no Picasso’).

Quoting attribute and domain names is optional if the name only contains letters, numbers, underscores (_), or dollar symbols ($) and does not start with a number. However, attribute and domain names that contain any other characters, such as spaces, must be quoted with escaped quotes (e.g., ‘Invisible’ Pink’ Unicorn’ Sightings’). 

SELECT `Invisible`` Pink`` Unicorn`` Sightings` from `My Domain` WHERE location = 'O''Brien, TX' AND `timestamp-1` > '' ORDER BY `timestamp-1`

Other examples of usage:
Continue reading…

The tool provides a visual interface to Amazon SimpleDB in the form of a Firefox plugin for querying and updating your Simple DB database domains.

This new tool complements the other visual tools available for managing Amazon services, also provided as Firefox plugin: Elastic Fox - the extension for interacting with Amazon EC2 and S3Fox - Firefox organizer for S3 and CloudFront, helps you organize, manage, and store your files on Amazon S3 and distribute them through CloudFront.

The tool is developed by Bizo, a B2B advertising network running entirely on top of AWS. The code is open source an hosted on github. Read more on the Bizo blog.