SEATTLE, Dec. 1 -- Amazon Web Services LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., today announced the unlimited public beta of Amazon SimpleDB, and the conclusion of the limited public beta. Any developer or business may now sign up and start using the service immediately. Also announced today, Amazon SimpleDB users can take advantage of a free monthly usage tier, and reduced pricing for structured data storage. Amazon SimpleDB is a Web service providing the core database functions of indexing and querying. To get started using Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services, go to http://aws.amazon.com.

Amazon SimpleDB is simpler than a traditional, relational database as it requires no schema, automatically indexes data, and provides simple APIs for storage and access. Amazon SimpleDB allows businesses and developers to easily scale database processing and frees developers from many of the complexities of capacity planning while transforming large capital expenditures into much smaller operating costs. Amazon SimpleDB also integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, to provide the infrastructure for Web-scale applications.

For at least the next six months, Amazon SimpleDB users will enjoy a free tier of usage. Every month, customers receive 25 machine hours, 1 GB of data transfer in and out, and 1 GB of storage at no charge. Amazon SimpleDB customers will also now enjoy significantly reduced storage pricing at only $0.25 per gigabyte per month, a price decrease of more than 83 percent.

Customers can now also sign up for AWS Premium Support for Amazon SimpleDB. AWS Premium Support offers technical assistance from the Amazon Web Services team whenever and as frequently as customers need it. Whether for operational issues or technical questions, Amazon SimpleDB customers now have access to developer support engineers around the clock, and can count on predictable response time and personalized support.

"Traditional clustered relational databases often require a sizeable upfront investment and complex design. Our customers have asked us for a simple, scalable, reliable and low-latency alternative," said Matt Domo, general manager of Amazon SimpleDB. "Amazon SimpleDB eliminates complexity so that developers and businesses can focus on optimizing applications and not administering their database. We're pleased that we can now make the service available broadly and also pass along the cost savings we've achieved."

MyMiniLife.com is a social networking site allowing anyone to fully express their physical life on the Web. "MyMiniLife processes millions of transactions per day and we were looking for a highly scalable system to support the load," said Joel Poloney, co-founder of MyMiniLife.com. "After looking at a couple of possibilities, we realized that the current relational database model would not be able to scale updates and inserts as well as Amazon SimpleDB. We jumped on to SimpleDB when it was in Private Beta and we've been extremely impressed with its scalability, low cost, and support team responsiveness."

Issuu is an online publishing service where people and businesses alike can upload and share documents. "SimpleDB serves as our main database for storing information about users and their publications," said Mikkel Jensen, founding partner and head of operations for Issuu. "When we first started out we knew that the ability to scale would be a central criterion for success and that off-the-shelf RDBMS systems just wouldn't cut it. With its scalable infrastructure Amazon SimpleDB was a natural choice for us. The low barrier to entry and amount of maintenance required means we don't need to have a staff of DBAs employed. Instead we can concentrate on our main goal of creating great services."

New Features for Amazon SimpleDB Coming Soon

To help customers better plan their future hardware and software investments, AWS today announced plans to release new features in the next few weeks that will make building cloud-based applications even easier with Amazon SimpleDB. These enhancements are in response to direct customer feedback and include:

• SELECT API -- With this feature, developers will be able to employ a familiar SQL-like query language when constructing queries and building applications. The SELECT API will further reduce the training required for new developers prior to using Amazon SimpleDB.
• Batch Put -- Enables developers to streamline the upload of multiple items or attributes with a single batch API request rather than multiple single-item calls.

About Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon SimpleDB (http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb) is a Web service providing the core functionality of a database, including fast storage and simplified querying of structured data. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud, making Web-scale computing available to developers without large capital outlays.

Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler than traditional clustered relational databases, requiring no schema, automatically indexing user data and providing a simple API for storage and access. Amazon SimpleDB eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. The ability to store structured data without first defining a schema provides developers with greater flexibility when building applications, and eliminates the need to re-factor an entire database as those applications evolve. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon's proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com Inc., a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto & industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS).

Amazon and its affiliates operate Web sites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon Web sites at www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn.