New SimpleDB Goodies: Enhanced Select, Larger Result Sets, Mandatory HTTPS

The Amazon SimpleDB team just cranked out a bunch of new features for the Select function, bumped up the maximum size of a batch of Select results, and also deprecated the old Query functions and the non-SSL interface. All of this new functionality is available through the 2009-04-15 version of the SimpleDB WSDL file. You can head straight to the documentation or you can keep reading to learn more.

The new functionality revolves around the Select function. Here’s what’s new:

• The like operator can now be used to search for a desired value embedded anywhere within an attribute value using the “%” character as a wildcard. Before this release the “%” had to be at the end of the search term, so that you could do searches such as “ like ‘Jeff%’ “. As of this release you can do searches of the form “ like ‘%Jeff%’ “.
• You can now reference use itemNames() to refer to the current item’s name in where and order by clauses.
• You can now use sorting even if the where clause contains the is null operator.
• The Select function can now return up to 2500 items at a time as long as they fit within the 1 MB result size limit. You can retrieve additional results by passing the NextToken value returned from the first call as input to the next one, and so forth.

As of this release the Query and QueryWithAttributes functions are considered deprecated and are not included in the WSDL file. Although these functions are still accessible through older versions of the SimpleDB WSDL file, it is time to start planning to migrate your code to use the Select function.

All requests to SimpleDB must now be made using HTTPS for security reasons.

— Jeff;