DynamoDB

DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database service provided by Amazon Web Services. Since it is managed by Amazon, users do not have to worry about operations such as hardware provisioning, configuration, and scaling. The offering primarily targets key-value and document storage.

History

As Amazon runs an e-commerce platform for millions of concurrent users, the underlying services powering the platform must be highly reliable and scalable. Failures in infrastructure would have significant financial consequences and would degrade consumer trust in Amazon's platform. Thus, the motivating purpose behind DynamoDB was a data-store used by these services that could keep up in both availability and scalability such that failure handling would not affect the availability of the platform.

Due to Amazon's problem space, many of these services only needed primary-key access to a data store. Some examples of this include shopping carts, customer preferences, and product catalog. Therefore, a simple NoSQL (primary-key) interface was chosen.

With all of these constraints in mind, DynamoDB combined various techniques together to create a highly available yet performant system.

Data Model

Key/Value Document / XML

DynamoDB is schemaless. Each table requires a primary key to identify its corresponding data item. However, there are no such constraints on non-key attributes.

DynamoDB can hold both structured or semi-structured data, such as JSON or XML.

Storage Architecture

Hybrid

DynamoDB supports a pluggable local persistence engine that can range from in-memory buffers with persistent backing to purely disk-oriented ones. This allows it to be flexible with an application's access patterns.

DynamoDB Logo
Website

http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/

Tech Docs

https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/dynamodb/

Developer

Amazon

Country of Origin

US

Start Year

2012

Project Type

Commercial

Written in

Java

Supported languages

C++, Go, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift

Operating Systems

Hosted

Licenses

Proprietary

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_DynamoDB