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Comment by arpinum

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 pile of custom code. All while giving up tooling so readily available for the RDBMS world.

In a world where Opex is much higher than Capex DynamoDB might make sense, but for me server costs are 5% of dev costs. And even if it works from a cost perspective, how many AWS services have the console experience ruined by DynamoDB? The UI tricks you into thinking its a data table with sortable columns, but no! DynamoDB limitations strike again and you are off on a journey of endless paging. The cost savings come at the expense of the user.

DynamoDB also isn't fast. 20ms for a query isn't fast, 30ms for an insert isn't fast. Yes its amazingly consistent and faster than other systems holding 500TB, but that isn't a use case for many users.

parent arpinum 6 years ago

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