A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#1

Post by timf » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 3:43 PM UTC

A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB
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Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#2

Post by SaltwaterC » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 3:59 PM UTC

The API doesn't bother me as much as the temporary authentication via STS. Temporary credentials for database access? Seriously? I am the only one who sees how ridiculous this is?

Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#3

Post by jedschmidt » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 4:29 PM UTC

I've been waiting for Mathias to write something like this, and I'm glad he didn't waste any time diving in. For those who don't know him, he has more breadth in the area of emerging datastores than anyone I know; he literally wrote the book on Riak[1].

I've also been acquainting myself with the DynamoDB API over the past week, and am building a node.js binding that I hope will abstract away most of the esoteric aspects of interacting with it. It has full API coverage currently and is tested in Travis[3], so now I'm writing the high-level interface. So far I've covered about half of the operations DynamoDB offers, but would love to hear any ideas/feedback.

    [1] http://riakhandbook.com/
    [2] https://github.com/jed/dynamo
    [3] http://travis-ci.org/jed/dynamo

Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#4

Post by jbellis » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 4:54 PM UTC

I'm still struck by what a strong endorsement DynamoDB is of the design decisions we've been making in Cassandra over the last couple years. Composite keys, distributed counters, ...

More details: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb

Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#5

Post by j2labs » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:37 PM UTC

jbellis wrote: post #4

I'm still struck by what a strong endorsement DynamoDB is of the design decisions we've been making in Cassandra over the last couple years. Composite keys, distributed counters, ... More details: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb

Didn't you folks design Cassandra after the Dynamo paper though?

Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#6

Post by taylorbuley » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 5:37 PM UTC

Does anyone know in which language DynamoDB is implemented? I've read somewhere that SimpleDB is done in Erlang. Is that the case with DynamoDB as well? I've been reading about Ets and Dets in Erlang and it makes me wonder whether they have anything to do with either of these data stores.

Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#7

Post by thamer » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 6:07 PM UTC

j2labs wrote: post #5

jbellis wrote: post #4

I'm still struck by what a strong endorsement DynamoDB is of the design decisions we've been making in Cassandra over the last couple years. Composite keys, distributed counters, ... More details: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb

Didn't you folks design Cassandra after the Dynamo paper though?

Composite keys (multi-dimensional) and distributed counters were not in the Dynamo paper. They were added to Cassandra, which is indeed based partially on Dynamo.

Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#8

Post by stonemetal » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 6:10 PM UTC

j2labs wrote: post #5

jbellis wrote: post #4

I'm still struck by what a strong endorsement DynamoDB is of the design decisions we've been making in Cassandra over the last couple years. Composite keys, distributed counters, ... More details: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb

Didn't you folks design Cassandra after the Dynamo paper though?

Yes, but the Dynamo paper offers two operations Get(key) and Set(key, value). Anything Cassandra adds atop that they did themselves i.e. column families, secondary indices.

Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#9

Post by amix » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 6:40 PM UTC

j2labs wrote: post #5

jbellis wrote: post #4

I'm still struck by what a strong endorsement DynamoDB is of the design decisions we've been making in Cassandra over the last couple years. Composite keys, distributed counters, ... More details: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb

Didn't you folks design Cassandra after the Dynamo paper though?

Cassandra initial team was lead by Avinash Lakshman who was one of the authors of Amazon's Dynamo. So it's not strange that Cassandra is hugely inspired by Dynamo (and vice versa).

Re: A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

#10

Post by cleaver » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 6:43 PM UTC

DynamoDB is not open source, at least according to a blog comment by Jeff Barr of AWS. (http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb-internet-...)

I'm certainly not going to commit to platform lock-in like that. I know a lot of folks were hit hard by Googles app engine price changes and it could happen again here with DynamoDB.