Amazon just announced its SimpleDB online database web service offering.

This sounds very interesting - but there are three drawbacks to it. 1. Currently (Jan 08) it´s only in limited beta, so not everyone can actually get his/her hands on it. 2. It´s solely an online service, so you can´t play around with it while not being connected to the internet. 3. From that also follows you´re forced to use different APIs if you want to store data online as well as offline.

To help overcome these drawbacks, I intend to develop an offline version of SimpleDB called NSimpleDB (short for ".NET SimpleDB") which sports the same API as Amazon´s database and also can be used just on your desktop.

If you want to give NSimpleDB a try and download the sources, please be sure to read the SourceCodeInstallationNotes first.

For a documentation of NSimpleDB see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of my blog series.

And if you´re interested in the static architectural quality of NSimpleDB, have a look at the NDepend analysis report.

-Ralf Westphal, www.ralfw.de