Does anyone have book recommendations on NoSQL modeling in general?
The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
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Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#32I bought the book, I read the book, I've used DynamoDB for awhile. It didn't change my mind. DynamoDB makes tradeoffs in order to run at massive scale, but scale isn't a problem many people need solving when 2TB of RAM fits in a single box. Meanwhile I need to handle eventual consistency, an analytics pipeline, another database for fuzzy search, another geo lookup database, Lambda functions to do aggregations, and a…
If you treat DynamoDB as a DBMS, you’re going to be disappointed (for the reasons you mention). But if you think of it as a highly-durable immediately-consistent btree in the cloud, it’s amazing. DynamoDB is closer to Redis than MySQL. Amazon does it a disservice by putting it in the databases category.
Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. This is a limitation we ran into trying to implement a critical accounting ledger on top of DynamoDB. The transaction model we came up with is formally verified w/ TLA+. We're turning our work into a product: txlayer.com
> This is a limitation we ran into trying to implement a critical accounting ledger on top of DynamoDB. Sounds like a perfect use case for a traditional RDBMS. Why Dynamo?
A fair question, and we’ve done it this way before at simple.com. When looking at the options for a pay-per use database, with global replication, streams and managed for you; We felt that if you could build a ledger on dynamo for these use cases, it’d be pretty compelling and fun.
Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#34> While your relational database queries slow down as your data grows, DynamoDB keeps on going. It is designed to handle large, complex workloads without melting down.
I mean- hand a person a gun, and they might shoot themselves in the foot. While you can make bad queries/workloads for a relational database, you can just as easily make bad workloads for DynamoDB.
Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#35I bought the book, I read the book, I've used DynamoDB for awhile. It didn't change my mind. DynamoDB makes tradeoffs in order to run at massive scale, but scale isn't a problem many people need solving when 2TB of RAM fits in a single box. Meanwhile I need to handle eventual consistency, an analytics pipeline, another database for fuzzy search, another geo lookup database, Lambda functions to do aggregations, and a…
If you treat DynamoDB as a DBMS, you’re going to be disappointed (for the reasons you mention). But if you think of it as a highly-durable immediately-consistent btree in the cloud, it’s amazing. DynamoDB is closer to Redis than MySQL. Amazon does it a disservice by putting it in the databases category.
I agree. DynamoDB is like a serverless child of Redis and MongoDB.
Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#36Does anyone have book recommendations on NoSQL modeling in general?
Tbh I don't think that makes sense since it depends on what your definition of NoSQL is. Some people say 'no relations' others say 'no sql' others say 'eventual consistency'. Some people call FaunaDB NoSQL because it's distributed and scales yet it offers strong consistency and relations and hence normalized data and joins is an option.
In others, you might have relations but lose consistency, in others you might have relations but only keep consistency under specific conditions (sharding keys etc)
NoSQL modeling typically depends on the specific characteristics of the database. Essentially it's about looking at these, see what it doesn't offer, compare that with what you need, and find workarounds.
Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#37I bought the book, I read the book, I've used DynamoDB for awhile. It didn't change my mind. DynamoDB makes tradeoffs in order to run at massive scale, but scale isn't a problem many people need solving when 2TB of RAM fits in a single box. Meanwhile I need to handle eventual consistency, an analytics pipeline, another database for fuzzy search, another geo lookup database, Lambda functions to do aggregations, and a…
Fair enough! I think that's a reasonable position.
IMO, there are two times you should absolutely default to DynamoDB:
- Very high scale workloads, due to its scaling characteristics
- Workloads w/ serverless compute (aka Lambda) due to how well it fits with the connection model, provisioning model, etc.
You can use DynamoDB for almost all OLTP workloads, but outside of those two categories, I won't fault you for choosing an RDBMS.
Agree that DynamoDB isn't _blazing_ fast. It's more that it's extremely consistent. You're going to get ~10 millisecond response times when you have 1GB of data or when you have 10 TB of data, and that's pretty attractive.
Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#38> While your relational database queries slow down as your data grows, DynamoDB keeps on going. It is designed to handle large, complex workloads without melting down. I mean- hand a person a gun, and they might shoot themselves in the foot. While you can make bad queries/workloads for a relational database, you can just as easily make bad workloads for DynamoDB.
My contention is that it's much easier to have an access pattern that won't scale in a relational database than in DynamoDB. DynamoDB basically removes all the things that can prevent you from scaling (JOINs, large aggregations, unbounded queries, fuzzy-search).
This is underrated, but it's really helpful. So many times w/ a relational database, I've had to tweak queries or access patterns over time as response times degrade. DynamoDB basically doesn't have that unless you really screw something up.
Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#39I bought this a few weeks ago and am about 130 pages in. It is just stunning how much better it is learning Dynamo/NoSQL in general from this than effectively any other source. Anyone who's had to rely on AWS docs knows how face-meltingly dense they can be. I went back and refactored all my previous Dynamo work last night, and the difference was night and day. I'm planning to migrate some relational structures later…
Thank you for the kind words! :) Glad you're liking it.
Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB
#40thanks for this. I just started creating my first DynamoDB database yesterday