Google Spreadsheets as a Data Store

I just finished BETA testing the DocSyncer tool which will keep mycomputer synced with my Google Docs account.

At first I had settings turned on to upload .html pages, which was a huge mistake....instantly it started publishing thousands of files of my local workstation, be careful.

Once I did get my 800+ word and excel documents published synced up without any effort I started looking through them and searching on topics. It was very interesting to find some items I don't even remember I have.

The I pulled out a simple JavaScript for pulling a JSON feed from a Google Spreadsheet and connected it to a list of businesses I had for the Portland area. Instantly I had published these business listings on the web using my Google Spreadsheet as a data store.

Very cool stuff, think it will be a while before everyone realizes the potential here.

Amazon Web Services - Simple DB

So I jumped the gun and blogged about the new Amazon DevPay web service and realized I hadn't even mentioned the other latest release from Amazon, the SimpleDB.

This is something I have been waiting for. I was already utilizing Amazon S3 for heavy storage of files, images, and large text blobs. I use MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server for most back-end databases, however 90% of the time I am using only about 10% of the capabilities available to me.

I am looking to add, update, and delete text and numeric data is very small amounts most of the time.

SimpleDB is perfect for this type of small to medium size web site and application deployment.

I am excited about playing around with it more and see if it can become the perfect scalable database platform that I have been looking for.