I'm attempting to use the upload facility with a two column table consisting of the columns uid and tokenTxt. uid identifies a document, and tokenTxt contains the distinct string of text contained in the document. All the rows in the table that relate to a given document have the same value for uid. I would like to use uid for the ItemName, whereas it appears Simple Database Explorer assigns it own ItemName.

Or, explained another way, if my two column contains ten rows, I want the result of the upload to be a single item in the Simple DB Domain, and the tokenTxt attribute contains the 10 different values found in the tokenTxt column. Is this possible?

Its doable. We will be adding it shortly.

We may need to create multiple items for same document as we may not be able to write all attributes in one item (I think the max size is 1024).

Do you have any specific recommendations for incrementing the ItemName when more than 1024 attributes are found and we need to create the a new item?

Saurabh -- I'm wasn't aware of the limitation of which you speak, so I dig some digging, and I found the following reference, which doesn't mention it. However, I will continue to dig and see if I can find a reference that confirms things one way or the other.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimpleDB/2007-11-07/DeveloperGuide/index.html?SDBLimits.html

Hope this helps!

Whoops...I re-read the limitations as per the link in the previous post, there's a line in there whichs says;

Attribute name-value pairs per item...256

I originally took that to mean you could describe a given item in 256 different ways (eg. color and and size would be two). I didn't think it applied to the total number of name-attribute pairs. I will continue to search for a definitive answer in this regard, and post what I find.

The answer can be found on the Amazon SimpleDB forum;

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=101070&#101070

The key phrase is; You can have 256 unique attribute names with one value each or you could have one attribute name with multiple (256) values or some combination in between.

Let me think about this in the context of my application and I'll let you know what I would like to do, and see if SDBX can be changed to accommodate. More shortly.

OK, I think I have got it clear in my head now. The table I will upload will now contain three columns; uid, txt, urlTxt. SDBX should allow my uid column to be used as the item name and I will look after ensuring it's unique for the domain. There will now only be two, additional name-value pairs for each item; txt and one for urlTxt. Each of them will have a limited (likely one) number of attribute values associated with them. So, in the example described in my original post, I would now expect the SimpleDB domain to contain 10 items once the upload is complete. This is close to what SDBX is delivering now, but I would suggest the following;

1) In the event that the attribute name for a name-value pair exists for a given item, give the user the option of either entirely replacing the existing attribute value(s) for that name-value pair, or alternatively, adding the newly uploaded value to the existing value, so long as it's different from the existing value. It should only be necessary to specify this once per upload, as opposed to once-per-item-per-upload.

2) There should be a mechanism which allows a table to be uploaded that contains just item names, and have it delete those items from the domain. This will facilitate keeping the SimpleDB domain in synch with the offline, relational table(s) being use to prepare the upload table in the first place.

Please let me know if you need any additional information or clarification. Thank you very much.

Hi Folks -- any update on this item? Wondering if there might be a new version available, yet, which incorporates the changes I suggested. Please let us know!! Best regards...

TerryG wrote:Hi Folks -- any update on this item? Wondering if there might be a new version available, yet, which incorporates the changes I suggested. Please let us know!! Best regards...

Terry,

Thanks for the feedback. We have release a new version which includes your suggestions.
You can find the release notes here ->
http://www.sdbexplorer.com/documentatio ... 08.11.html