Should I use CouchDB or SimpleDB?

Question

I'm creating an application that will be hosted on amazon EC2 and a lot of the data that'll be saved is more document oriented (as well as saving tweets and such related to those documents).

Right now I'm at a crossroads... should I use simpleDB or couchDB? Whats the pros/cons of using either? Should I just try both for a month and decide then?

Answer 1

You may find the the article Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB Compared to be useful.

I've also found that MongoDB gives excellent performance.

Answer 2

Keep in mind that if your code lives in EC2, SimpleDB will be presumably hosted in the same data center that your code is, which would give SimpleDB a lower latency than CouchDB for requests from an EC2 server. Also, Amazon doesn't charge you bandwidth costs between EC2 and SimpleDB.

I would expect SimpleDB to be both faster and cheaper for code running in EC2, for those reasons.