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The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

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Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#41

Post by abd12 »

siscia wrote: post #18

I work a little outside the standard startup hyper-scale, fast growing business, so forgive my question. But how widely used is DynamoDB? And for what use cases? And what are the problems with it?

In a nutshell:

- It was designed for super high scale use cases (think Amazon.com retail on Cyber Monday). It has decent adoption there. Competes mostly with Cassandra or other similar tools.

- With the introduction of AWS Lambda, it got more adoption in the 'serverless' ecosystem because of how well its connection model, provisioning model, and billing model works with Lambda. RDBMS doesn't work as well here.

A lot of people find 'problems' with it because they try to use it like a relational database, which it most certainly isn't. You have to model differently and think about it differently. The book helps here :).

Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#42

Post by avip »

DVassallo wrote: post #32
arpinum wrote: post #24

I 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.

DynamoDb is like redis without the fun data structures, the fantastic cli and discoverability, the usefull configurable tradeoff between fast and consistent, and really much-needed features s.a listing your keys.

Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#43

Post by abd12 »

seibelj wrote: post #12

DynamoDB is monster scale but... tricky to use and difficult pricing model. The paying for writers / readers thing is strange to me and makes it difficult to scale up for bursts. I recommend not using this tech for most things. You need to know exactly why you want to use it and have a good reason.

I'd much rather pay for reads & writes directly rather than guessing at how my CPU and RAM will translate to the reads and writes that I need.

RDBMS capacity planning basically goes:

1. How much traffic will I get? 2. How much RAM & CPU will I need to handle the traffic from (1).

With DynamoDB, you can skip the second question.

Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#44

Post by abd12 »

mellavora wrote: post #17
Niccizero wrote: post #4

$79 for the basic package? A bit pricey if you ask me.

Alex was super-helpful to me. I had an edge-case problem using batch writes; the issue was assembling the batch in R to pass through the paws api, basically a bunch of really tricky nested lists, and I had one element out of place. Alex answered my questions in such a way that I myself saw where the bug was in my code. He saved me easily several hours of time. At my hourly rate, this means that the book had a negativ…

Thanks for your support! I'm grateful for the fix you suggested as well :)

Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#45

Post by abd12 »

bwarren2 wrote: post #25
abd12 wrote: post #3

Waves Author here. Happy to answer any questions folks have about the book, about DynamoDB, or about self-publishing. NoSQL modeling is waaay different than relational modeling. I think a lot of NoSQL advice out there is pretty bad, which results in people dismissing the technology altogether. I've been working with DynamoDB for a few years now, and there's no way I'll go back. The book has been available for about a…

Bought the book, thank you! What was your approach to self-publishing here? What tools did you use? If I wanted to publish a book but knew nothing about it, what resources should I read and what approach would you recommend?

Thank you for your support!

The biggest advice I can give you is not about any specific tool, it's about an approach. You need to think about how you will market the book if you're self-publishing.

Engage with the community that will be interested in the book. Write articles, help out on Twitter, write code libraries, etc.

For me, I wrote DynamoDBGuide.com two and a half years ago over Christmas break. I wanted to just make an easier introduction to DynamoDB after I watched Rick Houlihan's talk at re:Invent (which is awesome).

That led to other opportunities and to me being seen as an 'expert' (even when I wasn't!). I got more questions and spent more time on DynamoDB to the point where I started to know more. I gave a few talks, etc.

I finally decided to do a book and set up a landing page and mailing list. I basically followed the playbook that Adam Wathan described for his first book launch.[0] Write in public, release sample chapters, engage with people, etc.

In terms of tooling, I used AsciiDoc to generate the book and Gumroad to sell. On a 1-10 scale, I'd give AsciiDoc a 5 and Gumroad an 8. But the tooling barely matters -- think about how to find the people that are interested :)

Happy to answer any other questions, either in public or via email.

[0] - https://adamwathan.me/the-book-launch-that-let-me-quit-my-jo...

Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#46

Post by arpinum »

DVassallo wrote: post #32
arpinum wrote: post #24

I 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.

The indexes are not immediately consistent.

Its not just that it is put in the database category, but that its champions at AWS make statements like "if you are utilising RDBMS you are living in the past", or that "there are very few use cases to choose Postgres over DynamoDB".

Btw, loved your AWS book!.

Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#47

Post by abd12 »

cactus2093 wrote: post #27
danenania wrote: post #21

DynamoDB is very compelling for performance, scalability, and low ops overhead, but I recommend thinking very carefully about the limited transaction support before going with it, as it’s likely to be a dealbreaker for many use cases, whether or not you realize that up front. I think most apps will need a transaction involving more than 25 rows at some point, and with dynamo your only option is to fire them off in gr…

Interesting, idk that I've ever needed a transaction with more than 25 rows. But I agree in general about the limitations. Having used RDBMSes like Postgres a lot, as well used Cassandra and DynamoDB in production, I would almost certainly not create a new app with DynamoDB as the primary DB. Even if you have an app where you expect to need to scale writes heavily, it's not going to be on all tables equally. For inst…

I can understand the sentiment and don't fault you for it.

That said, I think you can definitely handle complex, relational patterns in DynamoDB pretty easily. It will take some work to learn new modeling patterns, but it's absolutely doable.

Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#49

Post by bufferoverflow »

abd12 wrote: post #37
arpinum wrote: post #24

I 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 cho…

There's a third use: if you want a free ride, AWS free tier for DynamoDB is quite nice, enough to run a decent dynamic website.

Re: The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB

#50

Post by arpinum »

abd12 wrote: post #37
arpinum wrote: post #24

I 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 cho…

> Workloads w/ serverless compute (aka Lambda) due to how well it fits with the connection model, provisioning model, etc.

This is only true for AWS. Azure functions share resources and don't have this issue.

The speed is actually quite sad. Its 5-10x slower than my other databases at p95, and I can't throw money at the problem on the write side. Reads I can use DAX, but then there goes consistency.

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