How do you import Big Data public data sets into AWS?

Question

Loading any of Amazon's listed public data sets (http://aws.amazon.com/datasets) would take a lot of resources and bandwidth. What's the best way to import them into AWS so you start working with them quickly?

Answer 1

You will need to create a new EBS Instance using the Snapshot-ID for the public dataset. That way you won't need to pay for transfer.

But be careful, some data sets are only available in one region, most likely denoted by a note similar to this. You should register your EC2 instance in the same region then.

These datasets are hosted in the us-east-1 region. If you process these from other regions you will be charged data transfer fees.

Answer 2

FYI : SDBExplorer uses Multithreaded BatchPutAttributes to achieve high write throughput while uploading bulk data to Amazon SimpleDB. SDB Explorer allows multiple parallel uploads. If you have the bandwidth, you can take full advantage of that bandwidth by running number of BatchPutAttributes processes at once in parallel queue that will reduce the time spend in processing. SDBExplorer supports Import data from MySql and CSV to Amazon SimpleDB.

http://www.sdbexplorer.com

Disclosure : I am the developer of SDBExplorer.