James Hamilton posts about DynamoDB.
Finally! I’ve been dying to talk about DynamoDB since work began on this scalable, low-latency, high-performance NoSQL service at AWS. This morning, AWS announced availability of DynamoDB: Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon DynamoDB – A New NoSQL Database Service Designed for the Scale of the Internet.
In a past blog entry, One Size Does Not Fit All, I offered a taxonomy of 4 different types of structured storage system, argued that Relational Database Management Systems are not sufficient, and walked through some of the reasons why NoSQL databases have emerged and continue to grow market share quickly. The four database categories I introduced were: 1) features-first, 2) scale-first, 3) simple structure storage, and 4) purpose-optimized stores. RDBMS own the first category.
DynamoDB targets workloads fitting into the Scale-First and Simple Structured storage categories where NoSQL database systems have been so popular over the last few years. Looking at these two categories in more detail, Scale-First is:
Scale-first applications are those that absolutely must scale without bound and being able to do this without restriction is much more important than more features. These applications are exemplified by very high scale web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo, and Amazon.com. Some of these sites actually do make use of relational databases but many do not. The common theme across all of these services is that scale is more important than features and none of them could possibly run on a single RDBMS. As soon as a single RDBMS instance won’t handle the workload, there are two broad possibilities: 1) shard the application data over a large number of RDBMS systems, or 2) use a highly scalable key-value store.
And, here is a video with James and others at Amazon.