SimpleJDBC is a JDBC driver for Amazon's SimpleDB. SimpleJDBC makes it possible to use the myriad tools available that leverage standard JDBC interfaces to facilitate working with relational data (i.e. SimpleJDBC enables ETL tools, like Scriptella to import or extract data from SimpleDB).

Keep in mind, SimpleDB isn't a traditional relational database -- in fact, it's quite different. Nevertheless, it is possible to map basic SQL commands (and therefore JDBC) to the core API offered by Amazon. Using SimpleJDBC is straightforward. All that is required is Java 5 and the jar files provided in the download.

You load SimpleJDBC like you would any other JDBC driver.

``` Properties prop = new Properties(); prop.setProperty("secretKey", ...); prop.setProperty("accessKey", ...);

Class.forName("com.beacon50.jdbc.aws.SimpleDBDriver"); Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:simpledb://sdb.amazonaws.com", prop); ```

Note, with Amazon's web services, there is no notion of a username or password -- authorization is provided by keys; thus, to use SimpleJDBC, you must provide your Amazon secret key and your access key.

With a Connection instance, you can issue queries like SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, and INSERT -- you can use JDBC Statements or even PreparedStatements (although, the notion of a pre-compiled SQL query in SimpleDB doesn't exist; consequently, there isn't any affect on performance).

For example, SQL INSERTs are handled just like normal:

Statement st = conn.createStatement(); String insert = "INSERT INTO users (name, age) VALUES ('Ann Smith', 33)"; int val = st.executeUpdate(insert);

or

PreparedStatement pstmt = conn.prepareStatement("INSERT INTO users (name, age) VALUES (?, ?)"); pstmt.setString(1, "Annie Smith"); pstmt.setInt(2, 33); int val = pstmt.executeUpdate();

Note, because SimpleDB lacks rich data types (everything is a string), SimpleJDBC attempts to encode and decode numeric values. Thus, in the two INSERT statements above, 33 will be zero padded when stored in SimpleDB (i.e. 000033) and decoded back to 33 upon a SELECT query.

You can use the all too familiar JDBC ResultSet too:

``` String qry = "select * from users where name = 'Joe Smith'"; Statement st = conn.createStatement(); ResultSet rs = st.executeQuery(qry);

while (rs.next()) { int iage = rs.getInt("age"); //... } ```

Most basic SQL/JDBC features have been implemented -- you can view various test cases for more details. Note -- using SimpleDB forces you to understand eventual consistency; that is, ACID-ness isn't supported in SimpleDB. Nevertheless, in exchange for consistency (the "C" in ACID) you get massive scalability + reliability. In practice, this means you might run into cases where an immediate SELECT following an INSERT might not return a result. Consequently, you'll see that all test cases in SimpleJDBC sleep so as to provide for a deterministic situation in a JUnit environment.