A few days ago, Amazon announced another amazing web tool: part of its Web Services series, SimpleDB represents a Web-based database that will work in conjunction with the company’s already famous Amazon Simple Storage Service (or Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). By joining their forces, these web tools will be offering users the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

According to Amazon, SimpleDB will be launched in limited beta in just a few weeks. The company said that its new tool will provide “the core functionality of a database”, that is real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data, “without the operational complexity.” Thus, SimpleDB will automatically index data and do performance tuning, which will allow web developers to handle their work without needing a full-time database admin.

The ones who are interested in participating in the limited beta testing should sign up on Amazon’s web site, although the process requires that you either have an existing Amazon account or create one.

Amazon’s initiative comes as part of the company’s not so recent plan to take on companies such as Microsoft or IBM, which are the major players of the cloud-based computing arena. Although Amazon is best known as an online retailer, some users have already hailed its moves towards new fields.

SimpleDB will store relatively small amounts of information, but it will provide fast access to data. For those who need to store large amounts of data, Amazon recommends S3; then users can put pointers and metadata associated with the files in SimpleDB.