16 posts tagged with "DynamoDB"

I've become a big proponent of DynamoDB over the past few years. DynamoDB provides many benefits that other databases don't, such as a flexible pricing model, a stateless connection model that works seamlessly with serverless compute, and consistent response time even as your database scales to enormous size.

Yet data modeling with DynamoDB is tricky for those used to the relational databases that have dominated for the past few decades. There are a number of quirks around data modeling with DynamoDB, but the biggest one is the recommendation from AWS to use a single table for all of your records.

In this post, we'll do a deep dive on the concepts behind single-table design.

Over the past few years, I've helped people design their DynamoDB tables. For many, it's a struggle to unlearn the concepts of a relational database and learn the unique structure of a DynamoDB single table design. Primary keys, secondary indexes, and DynamoDB streams are all new, powerful concepts for people to learn.

Yet there's one feature that's consistently a red herring for new DynamoDB users -- filter expressions. I'm going to shout my advice here so all can hear:

Over the past few years, DynamoDB has gotten more and more popular as a database. This is for a few reasons, such as the way it fits so well with serverless architectures using AWS Lambda or AWS AppSync or due to the growing community around how to model DynamoDB spurred by the talks from the incredible Rick Houlihan.

When I talk to people who are new to DynamoDB, I often hear the same initial grumblings:

DynamoDB is a solid, well-loved product, but that hasn't stopped the DynamoDB team from innovating. At last year's re:Invent, we saw two huge announcements. DynamoDB Transactions brought transactions to DynamoDB and made it easier to handle complex, multi-item operations in a single request. DynamoDB On-Demand Pricing let you forget about capacity planning and only pay for what you use.

But as AWS customers, we still want more. It's the reason Jeff Bezos loves us -- we are 'divinely discontent'. In this post, I lay out my two big #awswishlist items for DynamoDB.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed NoSQL database that's exploding in popularity. It provides low-latency reads and writes via HTTP with low maintenance in a way that fits with high-scale applications.

At re:Invent 2017, AWS announced DynamoDB Global Tables. With Global Tables, you can write to a DynamoDB table in one region, and AWS will asynchronously replicate items to the other regions.

During my time at Serverless, Inc., I've talked with a lot of users about their serverless applications. One of the persistent questions that people ask is around which database to use.

Many people reach for DynamoDB as their database of choice, with good reason. It's the most serverless-friendly database, for a number of reasons: