In a nation divided by hundreds of things like religion, cast, region, culture, language etc there are two things which bind the nation like no other. Its movies and cricket. And when it comes to cricket, one short man stands tall among all the stalwarts. He is idol and inspiration to millions (including me). No prize for guessing, I am talking about Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar!! The man who s simply the best ever to play the game of cricket, the biggest cricket icon, the most worshiped cricketer by some distance. Its not easy for someone to fulfill expectations of his parents, friends and relatives ( and bosses/managers :P) etc and here we have someone who is carrying the burden of expectations of the nation for more than two decades successfully. I have grown up watching him taking on some of the best bowlers of all time. Performing at the biggest level with great consistency. I have read thousands of awesome articles in his praise but still cant get enough. Infect many of them have inspired me to write something abt him. We are not known to produce heroes in field of sports. There have been very few who can be called as world beaters in Indian sports. One of the best things I have ever read about Sachin and his contribution is, "when nation was going thru a scandal named bofors, when people were fighting with each other in name of mandir/masjid, when half of the country's gold was given to world bank for loan, when India was considered a third world nation, when even a fourth position in Olympics ( by P T Usha) was considered a great sporting achievement, a star arose.. sorry a SUN arose.. a 15 year old kid made the Indians proud... proved that world records can be created even by Indians.. he not only changed the Indian cricket single handedly.. he changed the outlook of Indians single handedly..Indians were no more losers.. they too can achieve.. he inspired a generation and many more generations to come.." In more than past two decades he has always been compared with many of the contemporary greats like Mark Waugh, Brian Lara, Inzy, Ponting, Steve Waugh, Rahul Dravid, Kallis upto Sehwag,AB D'Villiers, Virat Kohli and many more. Its to be noted that on the one side of comparison people have kept getting changed but Sachin has always remain constant on other side with whom all these people are often compared. I seriously don’t think anyone else can achieve that level of consistency. I have heard many people feeling jealous from Sachin for earning lot of money and often criticizing him for nothing. I just want to ask such loosers that if any CEO of a company having few thousand employees can earn millions per year then what problem you have from earning of a man who is handling pressure of expectations from more than one billion people and delivering successfully? That man is earning due to his hard work and talent and he deserves every bit of it. He anyways pays his taxes and does lot of charity work ( that too without doing any publicity for that) but still bunch of some frustrated people keep targeting him for no reason. How can u ever doubt commitment of a person who came to play for India just after 2-3 days of his father's death? In his absence India had lost even to Zimbabwe in the world cup match. People say his 100th century was against Bangladesh but they forget he has scored most number of centuries against Australia ( the most dominant team of his era). People write him off 1000 times but he makes a comeback even stronger on 1001 times and thats his greatest ability. In his own words, "People throw stones at me, I turn them into milestones."

What I have learned from Sachin as professional is to always answer your critics by performance and not words. Always remain focused on your goals and do your best irrespective of the situation. Don’t loose hope in difficult times and remain calm. Take failures into your stride and keep going on. If he is not the god, he s not less either. As a fan (infect fanatic) just want to say thank you Sachin for being an inspiration and role model. Also restating lines from one of my fav articles on the master, "You can take Sachin Tendulkar away from cricket field, but not from heart of millions of his fans."

This is second part of my article analyzing simple db. In first I had given an introduction and features of simple db along with where it should be used and where not. Now comes the interesting part which most of the people like; finding fault any product/system J. Anyways my intension here is to be constructive in pointing in drawbacks and also provide workarounds wherever possible. So below are some limitations with simple db:

1.       No Foreign Key and other constraints: Since simple db is not a relational database so here we don’t have foreign key or other constraints. For unique identification purpose the item name should be unique. But due to lack of other constraints we have to make sure of these relationships from application side. We can keep item name of one domain as attribute in other, but for any manipulation in data, we need to do it from application side.

2.       Space Limitations:  Simple db has some known space limitations. The complete list for the same is given in below link:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonSimpleDB/latest/DeveloperGuide/SDBLimits.html

One the main concerns due to these limits is that attribute value length is 1024 bytes i.e. you cannot store more than 1024 characters in single attribute value. This means its not possible to store value which is large in size ( like description of anything or some big comment ). Also it does not support clob and blob types so storing large data is problem. As a work around you need to break that data in small parts if possible and store and while retrieving you need to append them after selecting from domain.

3.       Query Response Limitations: In simple db query response time is 5 seconds. So in case of any network related problems we might not get proper data. Also, usually a select statement returns 100 items and in order to increase this limit you need to pay some extra charges which might not be feasible for all users.

4.       Issues with delete statement: There is a problem with simple db that you cannot delete records on the base of any attribute value. Its mandatory to provide item name in delete query.  Suppose you have records of employees where their emp id is the item name and they have name, email, address, city, phone as other fields. Now if you want to delete all employees who belong to city ‘Bangalore’ then for that first you need to fire a select statement to get all item Names where city is Bangalore. Then for each of those item names you will fire delete query. It may sound pathetic and stupid but that’s the only work around possible for such scenarios.

5.       Lack of date functions: Unlike Oracle, Mysql and other RDBMS, simple db doesn’t provide functions to manipulate dates which may sometime become critical for certain cases. So in such cases you need to retrieve data from domain and then using your programming language you will have to manipulate it. It might affect performance adversely.

6.       Lack of functions/procedures to manipulate data: As of now simple db doesn’t provide much inbuilt functions/procedures and neither you can write functions or procedures. So you can only make queries to data and then perform logical stuff in your application language.

7.       Performance: Simple DB performance tests reveal that the records retrieval is very slow as compared to other RDBMS. So for large data it makes system slow. Also if data inside a single domain becomes large then managing it becomes problematic and simple db does some throttling on operations performed on the data.

As the name suggests, its better store simple data which is not that large and avoid any sort of complexities. I would rather suggest to use conventional RDBMS for large applications which also involves complex data and operations. Simple db is a good product but cannot be used everywhere. And just when I am about to complete this article, have found a very detailed report on simple db issues in below link:

http://ryanpark.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/top-10-avoid-the-simpledb-hype/