I just started using Amazon SES for sending mails, and it made me wonder if there is a way to have your MySQL database stored on amazon while having the php files on your server. Anyone do this and what is the procedure?

You're probably not going to want to have your database and server in different locations as the additional latency will slow the site down more than any performance boost you may get from using one of their databases. 

 

I just started using Amazon SES for sending mails, and it made me wonder if there is a way to have your MySQL database stored on amazon while having the php files on your server. Anyone do this and what is the procedure?

You can do this, but why would you, the performance will be horrible.  If you want to use AWS, use compute for the app and RDS for the DB, won't be cheap but have done it multiple times.