I can't speak from experience yet, but I think it is premature to say SimpleDB sucks just because it's not your run of the mill relational dbms. SimpleDB is

I can't speak from experience yet, but I think it is premature to say SimpleDB sucks just because it's not your run of the mill relational dbms. SimpleDB is really a distributed, durable, indexed tuple store with read-often write-seldom in mind. It looks like a great platform for implementing something like a directory server. If rumors are to be believed, SimpleDB is really just Erlang + BerkeleyDB with some cpu limits (which makes sense since BerkeleyDB really only gives you access methods and raw storage). Personally, I'd like to see Amazon start providing a little tighter integration between their services. I'd like to be able to register a callback on an S3 upload that would enqueue an update to SDB via SQS and then bill the customer via FPS.