anyone know a decent SimpleDB Manager Tool, web-based or Mac, preferably free? I am surprised AWS doesn't have one built-in.
A free tool (Google Chrome plugin) is available at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddhigekdfabonefhiildaiccafacphgg?hc=search&hcp=main
Unfortunately there aren't any really well done SimpleDB Managers. I've used Scratchpad, SDB Explorer, and the SdbNavigator chrome extension. All have limitations. Don't waste your time on Scratchpad or your money on SDB Explorer - SdbNavigator is free and works better.
Personally I use SdbNavigator to run ad-hoc queries and small deletes. For most everything else I write simple Python scripts using Boto.
I haven't found anything that does multi-value attribute fields so it is best to just script it for now.
If you've got an IPad, I recommend CloudBase for managing SimpleDB and running queries. It's nice because you can save queries which reduces unnecessary typing.
Amazon makes this tool available as a sample. Javascript Scratchpad for Amazon SimpleDB
If for some reason the SDBNavigator Crome Plugin mentioned in another answer is not applicable for you, the tool RazorSQL also supports SimpleDB. It is not free though, and a Java Application.
You can use SDB Explorer. SDB Explorer provides an industry-leading and intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) to explore Amazon SimpleDB service in a thorough manner, and in a very efficient and user friendly way.
You can download and use SDB Explorer free for 30 days. The free version will stop working after 30 days if it isn't activated with a paid license key. It has many features like..
CSV Export/Import.
Experience fast, Multiple and parallel operartions.
Quick Search on Amazon SimpleDB Domain.
In-place cell editing.
Upload My-SQL data to Amazon SimpleDB.
AWS IAM interface to manage users, groups, polices and credentials for Amazon SimpleDB service.
Easy Listing of Domains from all Region End Points supported by Amazon SimpleDB.
Execute Queries like in any standard Database Query Tool.
Support for MAC/Linux/Windows platform.
On-line Help, Documentation, Demos, Screen shots, Discussion forums and Product Support.
http://www.sdbexplorer.com/
The tool that ended up working best for me was the SimpleDB management as part of the aws sdk for eclipse.
Even if you're not using eclipse for development, it's a simple install in order to just use it for SimpleDb management. Instructions:
eclipse install here
aws toolkit install here.
When choosing the components in the eclipse "available software" dialog, just pick these 2:
AWS Toolkit for Eclipse Core
Amazon SimpleDB Management
Once installed, show the AWS Explorer view (Window->Show View->Other and type 'aws'). It'll prompt you for your aws credentials. In the AWS Explorer view, you'll see Amazon SimpleDB in the tree.
This tool let's you:
Choose a region
Create/delete domains
Query the domain
Edit items
Export data to .csv
View domain metadata, like item count and total size
Check out SDB Tool, a great Firefox plugin. It's free and I've never had a problem.
Related
Is there a way to automate backups for my Jira Cloud site on a daily basis including pulling all the data and attachments?
Atlassian provides option to import-export xml however that cannot be automated as far as I know. Your next best bet to automate it by yourself would be Jira developer APIs (https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/intro/).
Using APIs you can pull data to a greater extent. However it may not be as intuitive as you may want or how it used to be on the on-prem version of Jira server (DB backups). However you may want to plan the efforts & cost for the script maintenance, cataloging the downloaded data and maintaining the data for long term. You can find some details in this thread - JIRA with Python
Alternatively you may want to go for 3rd party apps in Atlassian marketplace which supports automatic/scheduled backups of Issues & Configuration, granular & full project restores, long term storage and secure offsite storage.
Disclaimer - I work at Revyz, we have developed a Jira app which solves this exact problem. We backup & restore Atlassian Jira along with other features as mentioned above. You may want to take a look at https://www.revyz.io/ &
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1228694/revyz-backup-restore?hosting=cloud&tab=overview
I have a MVC4 application that runs on the cloud. I keep multiple backups but I would like also to have a backup some place online.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I could put this backup. In total the 3 projects I have occupy about 250MB. Could I store these somehow in an area of the cloud that I am already paying for. What about other places online?
Do you not use version control? If not, this would be the time to start.
Check out GitHub or Bitbucket. Both are free to use for public repositories, and have very affordable plans for private projects.
I would recommend Microsoft Team Foundation Server. TFS is integrated into Visual Studio.
Some of the key features
Up to 5 users free of charge
Unlimited number of projects
Continuous delivery to Azure (that can be very handy for you)
Work item tracking
Agile planning tools
Feedback management
VS Integrated Build (however, that feature is still in preview)
I've been using that service for several months and I would definitely recommend it.
I use dropbox for some of my backups, but there are plenty of alternatives, like Amazon S3, or hosting providers like RackSpace etc.
I also have a NAS box that I back up to. I installed SVN on it too, which I access via my laptop and my main desktop PC, so I pretty much always have at least 3 copies of the code at any one time. The SVN repository is also backed up to an external hard disk.
I don't use Azure (yet), so I don't know how their backup services work. I did find this link though, that might help you figure out if you can store your files separately.
I imagine, though, with it being hosted in a cloud based system, your code will be backed up and spread across quite a few servers - so it might not be that much of a problem for you.
We are building an image and file hosting website and we will save these files on our servers, so I want to know if there are any best practices or standards I need to read and follow to make our website scalable and easy to extend in the future.
Is there a book or articles or videos talking about this subject, please share.
As per my experience to deal with large data.
its always best to opt for Cloud, check for "Amazon S3" (Amazon AWS) or Windows Azure.
features like "CDN" (cloud front) is a big plus.
I believe this is not a simple question that can be answered without knowing
how many files are expected ?
how many users/files accesses per hour/day/minute ?
your usage scenarios with this files (downloading? streaming? how many concurrent files downloaded at once?
are you stuck in one particular OS (windows) and filesystem (NTFS), or is there freedom in this ?
My personal note : Building own image/file hosting is not a trivial task, i strongly recommend you to hire somebody with experience from this area.
I would recommend that if possible, you look at a 3rd party solution that provides an api. you'll then get the benefits of lower cost of ownership, no maintenance costs for the hardware and continual updates thrown in for free when the 3rd party adds new features to the core offering. I know this from 1st hand experience as we scoped out the options for doing this in a recent project and came to the conclusion that we'd spend 100 times more on our own solution and even then, may not get it right. We opted for a company called Razuna who offer both a hosted and open source version of their platform. Their api is very straightfwd and can be consumed inside your mvc app with potentially only a few days effort (depending on your use case). The beauty of this approach is that the hosted elements are actually on the nirvanix backbone and are served via their CDN - so win win.
You can get the details at:
http://www.razuna.com
and can view the api docs at:
http://wiki.razuna.com/display/ecp/Developer+Guides
Good luck and if you need any further real-life guidence on this, feel free to come back. Oh and btw, we were also able to ask for 'paid for' features to be added to the core offering at pretty much standard market day rates.
First off, the little voice inside my head is screaming that this is a bad idea and it shouldn't be done, but my pragmatic side is asking "How bad could it be?"
The stark fact is most of my company's day to day "business" happens in one MS Office tool or another. Data is exported out of our custom tools as *.tab, *.csv, manipulated in Excel and imported back in with variying degrees of success.
Most of these custom tools are ASP.NET MVC web applications whose usability could be enhanced by more interoperability with Office.
I've fought the good fight for many years saying Office on a web server is a terrible idea. Lately I've been thinking that the enhanced usability outweighs the potential risks.
Am I going crazy?
You don't say what version of MS Office you are using in your workplace or what type of interoperability you are after.
If you want to generate Office documents 'on the fly' directly from the web application, then if you are using Office 2007 or 2010, the default document formats (.docx, .xlsx) are based on the Open XML SDK. This means that it is possible to generate documents dynamically without having to install MS Office on the web server.
If you are using Office 2003 or earlier, it is generally considered bad practice to install MS Office on the server - it is an unsupported configuration.
This Microsoft article outlines many of the possible issues you may face if you decide to go down this route.
Microsoft Office is not designed to work in a server which could be a highly distributed, multithreaded environment. It is a client application which by the way is mainly unmanaged code. So installing it and using it from a web server could hide potential problems: leaking handles, GDI objects, marshaling between managed/unmanaged memory, STA COM objects, etc. I would recommend you using only tools which have been designed to be used in a server environment.
You can create good office documents without installing office on the web server. Options include SpreadsheetML, components from aspose.net, and even just changing the file extension and content type on html responses to fool office itself.
If you do not want to install the full Office suite, then you can just install the Microsoft Office Primary Interop Assemblies?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa159923(office.11).aspx
I've seen this work in environments with very low loads...but as soon as the load increases the issues start to creep up. This has even be documented by Microsoft as the article pointed by Jazza clearly shows. Notice that this article is quite recent (July/2010).
The issues that I've seen are memory leaks, instances of Word/Excel not being stuck in memory, weird registry issues, and so on.
Another thing to consider is that Microsoft will not support you if you call them with issues related to Office on a server environment.
Again, if you only have a few users this might not be a problem for you initially but be prepared for scale issues.
I just watched the Windows Azure intro video and it left me feeling like it was a front end shell for hosted IIS instances. Can anyone who know more (possibily that was part of the beta) shed on why you would use this vs. EC2.
it seemed easy enough but really didnt give specifics on how it works, why it works or why you would use this vs the traditional solutions out there?
According to the vision (and I can only talk about the vision here since the product isn't really out yet), here's a couple of reasons you might consider Azure over EC2.
Azure includes built-in load balancing abilities. If you want to do that in Amazon, you have to roll your own solution or buy a third-party solution like www.RightScale.com.
Azure-friendly-coded apps can be delivered internally or in Microsoft's cloud. If you write apps that have confidential information like financial data or health care data, not all of your clients will be willing to put their data in the public cloud. In that case, they can deploy your apps internally on Windows. That's sold as a skillset win, because you can go from public to private projects. Don't get me wrong - if you master Amazon EC2 development, then you can deploy your apps internally with Linux virtual servers in your datacenter, but it's not as turnkey. (Hard to describe a tech preview as turnkey when it's not licensed yet, hahaha.)
Having said that, it wasn't clear that the load balancing functionality is included in the box with internal deployments. If you have to do a combination of Azure plus ISA Server, that'll be a tougher deployment and management sell.
AppHarbor is a .NET cloud hosting environment that sits on Amazon EC2. The nice thing is they offer a free plan (much like Heroku does) so you can check it out yourself with very little friction.
My company is using Amazon EC2 now and I am down at the PDC watching the details on Azure unfold. I have not seen anything yet that would convince us to move away from Amazon. Azure definitely looks compelling, but the fact is I can now utilize Windows and SQL server on Amazon with SLAs in place. Ray Ozzie made it clear that Azure will be changing A LOT based on feedback from the developer community. However, Azure has a lot of potential and we'll be watching it closely.
Also, Amazon will be adding load balancing, autoscaling and dashboard features in upcoming updates to the service (see this link: http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/new-features-for-amazon-ec2/). Never underestimate Amazon as they have a good headstart on Cloud Computing and a big user base helping refine their offerings already. Never underestimate Microsoft either as they have a massive developer community and global reach.
Overall I do not think the cloud services of one company are mutually exclusive from one another. The great thing is that we can leverage all of them if we want to.
Microsoft should offer up the ability to host Linux based servers in their cloud. That would really turn the world upside down!
Well it's more than just web services. It will also allow you to host other types of connected applications. Plus it provides integrated access to other MS software on the cloud; i.e. SharePoint, Exchange, CRM, SQL data sevices, and will allow you to fully customize and extend those offerings in the same way that you would be able to customize and extend them if they were hosted on-premises.
At the Archtect Insight Conference last year they mentioned that they have started to alter core server products to deal with the large scale failover environment which is very interesting to me at least.
Its bunch of stuff that is coming into the Cloud. I think of this as more of Platform in the Cloud.
Sql Server
CRM
MOSS
Exchange
BizTalk
Geneva (identity)
The terms that are mentioned here are "STORE" and "COMPUTE"
For me this get really intersting around the IDEA of a Internet Service Bus.
It is also about moving to the development workflow process too.
OSLO DSLs and Qudrant - Moving to a Model Driven View
Entity Framework - giving developers strong typed model in code at a click of button
ADO Data Services and Data Dynamic Webtemplates using MVC
Then with the Azure Templates and the new "WebRoles" moving to deployment of the applications to the Cloud.
Then for the Admins one click provisioning of servers is awsome.
On the Data Privacy Rules... which is the one big elephant in the room and has been mentioned... Typically there is the often a ruling in each Country about information security.
UK RIPA
US Patriot Act
Are these really conceptully different? And these 2 countries do share information anyway...IMHO (legally they are different, but to a customer both laws give access to customer data its just question of who)
At this point, information on Windows Azure is pretty scarce. I was in the keynote during the announcement, and my best guess at this point is that they're trying to provide a more extensive virtualization environment than simply hosted IIS instances.
At this point, though, I can't say more than that.
We use S3 for storage very successfully and I've always kept an eye on EC2 for Windows and SQL Server support. So now these are available I dug further.
I was pretty worried when I read this:
http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/11/bad-storage-performance-on-amazon-ec2-windows-servers/
Perhaps, as we're developing what will hopefully become a very popular website, we should be considering the new data store models - Azure's or Amazon's SimpleDB. Hmmmmm - complete rewrite!
The major difference going forward is that Amazon EC2 is free from today Nov 1, Check this out.
http://www.buzzingup.com/2010/10/amazon-announces-free-cloud-services-for-new-developers/