Partitioning

SimpleDB is designed to provide a maximum of 100 domains per account and each domain is limited to a maximum domain data size of 10 GB. There is always the possibility that the size limitation of 10 GB will be a limiting factor when your dataset needs to be larger. In such cases, SimpleDB gives you the ability to create multiple domains. This will of course mean that data will need to be partitioned among the multiple domains so that each dataset in a domain is under the 10 GB size limit.

Your dataset might naturally partition along some dimension. For example, let us assume that our songs domain is hitting the limit of 10 GB. We could partition our domain into multiple domains, each dedicated to a specific genre. However, this will add complexity to our application as currently SimpleDB domain queries cannot be made across domains. Any partitioning of the data means that we will need to make select queries for each domain and then aggregate the results in the application layer...