The DynamoDB Book: Data Modeling with NoSQL and DynamoDB • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by abd12 » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

raynguyen wrote: post #110

This looks like a great resource. One thing I'm struggling with is the ability to sort and filter and was wondering if the book goes into detail about this topic. If I have a person entity and its attributes listed out in a table. How would you go about sorting by first name, last name, created at, etc... I was thinking of streaming everything over to elastic search, but that would add extra complexity to maintain.

Yep! There are entire chapters on sorting & filtering. Note: it's different than in a relational database, but it's doable :)

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

#112

Post by raynguyen » Sat, May 16, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

abd12 wrote: post #111

raynguyen wrote: post #110

This looks like a great resource. One thing I'm struggling with is the ability to sort and filter and was wondering if the book goes into detail about this topic. If I have a person entity and its attributes listed out in a table. How would you go about sorting by first name, last name, created at, etc... I was thinking of streaming everything over to elastic search, but that would add extra complexity to maintain.

Yep! There are entire chapters on sorting & filtering. Note: it's different than in a relational database, but it's doable :)

Awesome! Glad to hear that there's a section on that. Quick question. I'm thinking of leveraging elasticsearch for the fulltext search capabilities. Is the work to get sorting on various different attributes heavy from a dev perspective and is there any advantages of doing it through dynamo rather than querying with elasticsearch?

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

#113

Post by AlisdairO » Sun, May 17, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

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…

I'd been sort-of considering buying this for a while and the coupon made me pull the trigger. Thanks!

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

#114

Post by lbruck » Mon, May 18, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #52

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…

Others are comparing DynamoDB to Redis and Cassandra. It has additional limitations. These are fairly clearly spelled out but maybe weren't highlighted as prominently a few years back. (I say that because I inherited an application that made heavy use of DynamoDB but turned out not to be a great fit for DDB.) - It provides rich types with some odd limitations: strings, sets, lists, and binaries do not allow empty val…

Regarding the empty string and binary values: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/amazon-dy...

(Disclosure: I work for AWS on DynamoDB and on this)