As part of the Amazon Web Services family, Amazon’s SimpleDB is a massively scalable and reliable key/value datastore, which is exposed via a web interface and can be accessed using any language you’d like — from Java to Ruby to Perl to C#. In fact, Amazon has recently released a standardized SDK for both the .NET and Java platforms.

Check out IBM DeveloperWorks’ newest article entitled “Cloud storage with Amazon’s SimpleDB, Part 1” — in this article, you’ll see firsthand how to leverage Amazon’s Java SDK to work with SimpleDB. In fact, this is the first of two articles exploring SimpleDB’s unique approach to schemaless data storage, including a demonstration of one of the datastore’s most unusual features: lexicographic searching.

Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll cover using JPA to work with SimpleDB. Until then, happy reading!