Use Amazon SimpleDB for Free

Amazon has announced a new pricing tier today for their web services based distributed database engine SimpleDB. They have lowered storage price by 83% ($0.25/gb/month), and added a free usage tier.

Each month, there is no charge for the first 25 machine hours, 1 GB of data transfer (in and out), and 1 GB of storage that you use.

Amazon promises to keep the free usage tier in place for at least 6 months, but I think it may become a permanent fixture. More than anything else this will open up their platform to a lot of new developers, who will build applications that will eventually use and transfer more than 1GB of data.

SimpleDB and ColdFusion

There are a few ways you can use Amazon's SimpleDB web service with CFML. First the AWS Console Project on riaforge has a SimpleDB CFC that you can use.

If you are running OpenBD they have built SimpleDB support into the cfquery tag..

You can also use Amazon's SimpleDB Java Library API with ColdFusion.