29 Jan 2008

Storing Utf 8 Values In Simpledb Using The Rest

SimpleDB, the revolutionary schema-less database offering from Amazon, does not support UTF-8 values via its REST interface.

There are similar issues when dealing with shared hosts, or shared databases, and being forced to store UTF-8 data as non-UTF-8 records. A simple hack, using the fact that all non-ASCII characters have an HTML equivalent like Ӓ, can be used to fix this.

This does restrict the ability to search or sort UTF-8 records, but since SimpleDB does not support sorting and has only basic support for searching, it is not a major issue.