* Low touch - Amazon SimpleDB automatically manages infrastructure provisioning, hardware and software maintenance, replication and indexing of data items, and performance tuning. * Highly available - Amazon SimpleDB automatically creates multiple geographically distributed copies of each data item you store. * Flexible - As your business changes or application evolves, you can easily reflect these changes in Amazon SimpleDB without worrying about breaking a rigid schema or needing to refactor code – simply add another attribute to your Amazon SimpleDB data set when needed. * Simple to use - Amazon SimpleDB provides streamlined access to the store and query functions that traditionally are achieved using a relational database cluster – while leaving out other complex, often-unused database operations. * Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services - Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 and EC2, providing the infrastructure for creating web-scale applications. * Secure - Amazon SimpleDB provides an https end point to ensure secure, encrypted communication between your application or client and your domain. In addition, through integration with AWS Identity and Access Management, you can establish user or group-level control over access to specific SimpleDB domains and operations. * Inexpensive - Amazon SimpleDB passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay only for resources you actually consume. For Amazon SimpleDB, this means data store reads and writes are charged by compute resources consumed by each operation, and you aren’t billed for compute resources when you aren’t actively using them (i.e. making requests).

* Bring NoSQL to your SQL database - IBM Informix unleashes new capabilities, giving you a way to combine unstructured and structured data in a smart way. IBM Informix offers a “hybrid” database system that is capable of supporting relational and non-relational data, giving you the ability to store JSON and relational tables in the same storage engine. * Meet the Big Data challenges of sensor data - Informix, with its TimeSeries feature, helps organizations solve the Big Data challenge of sensor data by providing unprecedented performance and scalability to applications that leverage time series data. * Speed and efficiency let you do more and spend less - Informix is fast. Informix was built from the ground up for performance. Higher performance means fewer servers – and less space, power, and cooling resources. * Options, not hassles, for achieving continuous availability - IBM Informix offers the industry's most comprehensive set of high availability options that can take advantage of low-cost hardware with Informix Flexible Grid. * Easy administration lets you maximize DBA resources - Informix software automatically senses and responds to changes without human or programmatic intervention. * Reduce cost and risk of private cloud and distributed enterprise deployments - Helping to reduce the cost and risk of private cloud, Informix 12.1 is the only database that allows different hardware and operating systems from cluster to cluster in a distributed environment. * Enhanced security speeds time to compliance - Organizations will have greater control over auditing practices with selective row level auditing.