I’ve just received an email from Amazon about a new service they’ll be rolling out soon. Amazon SimpleDB, which will compliment their growing range of web services, will work with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to provide the ability to store, process and query datasets in the cloud.

This is something that many developers will find attractive. I know we use Amazon web services for some of our larger web properties, for a range of things from backups to image hosting, and this new addition could be useful for several uses.

Amazon Says “Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity.”

This will be appealing to startups, as setting up complex database solutions can be costly. Existing companies can also reap benefits, but being web-based, if speed is of importance you’d be better off maintaining your own database infrastructure.

The private BETA will be available in a few weeks - I can’t wait to try it out. Drop a comment if you’re interested to hear about our experiences with it.