SimpleSQL: A Relational Layer for SimpleDB

This paper introduces SimpleSQL, a relational layer over Amazon SimpleDB, one of the most popular document-oriented cloud databases. SimpleSQL offers a SQL interface that abstracts any knowledge about data modeling, data persistence and data accessing at SimpleDB. This paper presents the architecture, data and operation mapping from a relational database to SimpleDB, as well as some experiments that evaluate query performance on accessing cloud data using SimpleSQL and using only SimpleDB. Our contribution is a solution for accessing SimpleDB through a relational layer, being the basis for a general approach to relational-to-(document) cloud mapping. The experimental evaluation shows that our solution is promising, since the over-head with data accessing through SimpleSQL is not prohibitive.