abd12

I always tell people there are two clear areas where DynamoDB has some major benefits:

- Very high scale applications that can be tough for an RDBMS to handle

- Serverless applications (e.g. w/ AWS Lambda) due to how the connection model (and other factors) work better with that model.

Then, for about 80% of OLTP applications, you can choose either DynamoDB or RDBMS, and it really comes down to which tradeoffs you prefer.

DynamoDB will give you consistent, predictable performance basically forever, and there's not the long-term maintenance drag of tuning your database as your usage grows. The downside, as others have mentioned, is more planning upfront and some loss of flexibility.

One difference with DynamoDB is that there's no query planner, so you can have a pretty good sense of how many items you'll hit and how big that read is.

Nice post!

Question for you -- what are the performance implications of "re-keying" my records during the transform? Should I try to keep the same key for my transformed record as from my original record so that they align with the same partitions, or are they likely going to get sent to different partitions across different brokers anyway?

Wow! Congrats to you, Jay and Frank. I've been a fan of your work on both Seed.run & Serverless Stack for a while. Best of luck, and I'm excited to see Seed grow :)

I highly recommend this book and Swyx's other work. He's thorough while also distilling down to the most important bits.

Great book for people that are just starting their coding career but also for those with a good bit of experience. If you're feeling 'stuck', this is a great guide to understand how to advance your career.

'Learn in public' is probably the #1 piece of advice I'd give to anyone in tech. It helps your writing, it builds your network, and it grinds down your ego (because people will certainly let you know when you're wrong). Swyx has been a huge proponent of this, and this whole book is a great kick in the pants to get started.

I'd be shocked if this book doesn't make you >>>10x the amount you spend on it (even counting a healthy hourly rate for reading it).

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

Yep! It comes with PDF, MOBI, and EPUB formats :)

It depends!

For me, I like that 98% of DynamoDB work is frontloaded. I spend the time building the model but once it's done -- set it and forget it.

With RDBMS, it's like there's a hidden 5% tax that's lurking at all times. You have to spend time tuning querying, reshaping data, changing patterns, etc. It can add up to significant drag over time.

Different teams might think the costs are different for their application, or they may be fine with one pattern over the other. Fine with me! I just know which one I choose now :)

Thank you! I really appreciate it :) Hit me up if you have any questions!

Haha, I love that story at the end. I promise not to tell your company that it is a database.

luhn responded to this one pretty well :)

Basically, most of these issues are gone. As long as you don't have extreme skew in your partition keys, you don't need to worry about throughput limits.