One of the recommended practices of SimpleDB is to store the metadata in SimpleDB and the large data in S3. For instance, you could upload your FLAC encoded music library to S3. Each audio file has metadata, like an artist, album, title, track, genre, year, etc. This metadata could be entered as items within SimpleDB. Each item would also include a URL to the actual FLAC audio file stored in S3. You could then run queries against SimpleDB to find different music that matches your criteria. For instance, find all items where the “artist” is “Nerf Herder“. This would return all items, which would include the URL to the audio file, from your music collection that were performed by Nerf Herder. You could then have you audio player on your laptop play the audio, retrieving it from S3. This would allow you to access your music from anywhere and have it stored in a highly reliable system in case your CD was scratched.

I think that this could be a really neat system. Though, it does remind me more and more of the “old” mainframe systems. (Okay. I am really not that old. At Pearson where I currently work, they still use a mainframe.) I have been interested in S3 for some time, like my littles3 implementation, so I will probably keep my eye out for interesting uses of SimpleDB. I also wonder what Google will do to have something like this. I have heard rumors about Google’s “GDrive” for over a year now.

Now if I can only find some reason to justify using SimpleDB once it is available. (It is in limited beta right now.)

(Oh! My little example of “outsourcing” the storage of your music catalog from above could also be related to the book that I am currently reading, “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich“.)

“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase by daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”

I thought that this sounded very agile development-ish. (And he would be a good GIMP plug-in developer. GIMP is scripted with something called Script-Fu.) This is also very “Getting Real“-ish, popularized by 37signals.

…just a random thought.