After setting up the basic drawing and capture program for creating machineable images, I focused on storing the images and route data. Naturally my first thought was to put them into a database. Since I am most familiar with MySQL that seamed to be the obvious choice. Recently I began exploring non-relational databases, specifically Amazon's SimpleDB. The advantage of the SimpleDB architecture is that it is quickly scaled and highly available without fancy hardware and a wizard DB guy. Since my application is very basic the SimpleDB structure will work fine. The SimpleDB API and S3 Storage API were easy to install and the examples are documented well enough. After an hour I had my drawing canvas program setup to record the picture and route data to Amazon's S3 storage and place the addresses in the SimpleDB.
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