Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1. Getting Started
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, cloud-hosted, NoSQL database. It provides fast
and predictable performance with the ability to scale seamlessly. It allows you to store and
retrieve any amount of data, serving any level of network traffic without having any opera-
tional burden. DynamoDB gives numerous other advantages like consistent and predictable
performance, flexible data modeling, and durability.
With just few clicks on the Amazon Web Services console, you are able create your own
DynamoDB table and scale up or scale down provision throughput without taking down
your application even for a millisecond. DynamoDB uses
Solid State Disks
(
SSD
) to store
the data which confirms the durability of the work you are doing. It also automatically rep-
licates the data across other AWS Availability Zones, which provides built-in high availab-
ility and reliability.
In this chapter, we are going to revise our concepts about the DynamoDB and will try to
discover more about its features and implementation.
Before we start discussing details about DynamoDB, let's try to understand what NoSQL
databases are and when to choose DynamoDB over Relational Database Management Sys-
tem (RDBMS). With the rise in data volume, variety, and velocity, RDBMSes were neither
designed to cope up with the scale and flexibility challenges developers are facing to build
the modern day applications, nor were they able to take advantage of cheap commodity
hardware. Also, we need to provide a schema before we start adding data, and this restric-
ted developers from making their application flexible. On the other hand, NoSQL databases
are fast, provide flexible schema operations, and make effective use of cheap storage.
Considering all these things, NoSQL is becoming popular very quickly amongst the deve-
loper community. However, one has to be very cautious about when to go for NoSQL and
when to stick to RDBMS. Sticking to relational databases makes sense when you know that
the schema is more over static, strong consistency is must, and the data is not going to be
that big in volume.
However, when you want to build an application that is Internet scalable, the schema is
more likely to get evolved over time, the storage is going to be really big, and the opera-
tions involved are okay to be eventually consistent. Then, NoSQL is the way to go.
There are various types of NoSQL databases. The following is the list of NoSQL database
types and popular examples:
