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Dec. 22nd, 2024 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Amazon DynamoDB - The Definitive Guide, by Aman Dhingra and Mike Mackay
Over the years I've preferred to find out about new tools and techniques by reading a book about them. For quite a while, I'd been looking for a book on DynamoDB, but none worth taking seriously seemed to show up, as if this mode of learning had gone out of fashion (despite books on other NoSQL databases being readily available). I came across this recent release rather randomly, by searching without much expectation.
This covers the necessary ground, and it does so competently. To me, DynamoDB is difficult to classify among the varieties of NoSQL - is it a key-value store or a document store? It leans more toward the former, but with some features of the latter. The book gives various examples of the operations that can be performed, including through the use of the AWS console and the NoSQL Workbench tool, with a good description of the billing models available.
A fair amount of the book is dedicated to database design, with contrasts drawn from the more conventional normalization of RDBMS schemas. Secondary indexes are explained, with the pros and cons of the local and global options. There's some material on the internal architecture of DynamoDB, which is interesting but perhaps not directly relevant. More advanced topics include backup and restore, change data capture (CDC) streams, caching and multi-region operations. The final chapter on migrations is particularly practical, including some cases where DynamoDB may not be a good option. This book feels like it fills a gap in the market, and gives a pretty good grounding on the database.
Over the years I've preferred to find out about new tools and techniques by reading a book about them. For quite a while, I'd been looking for a book on DynamoDB, but none worth taking seriously seemed to show up, as if this mode of learning had gone out of fashion (despite books on other NoSQL databases being readily available). I came across this recent release rather randomly, by searching without much expectation.
This covers the necessary ground, and it does so competently. To me, DynamoDB is difficult to classify among the varieties of NoSQL - is it a key-value store or a document store? It leans more toward the former, but with some features of the latter. The book gives various examples of the operations that can be performed, including through the use of the AWS console and the NoSQL Workbench tool, with a good description of the billing models available.
A fair amount of the book is dedicated to database design, with contrasts drawn from the more conventional normalization of RDBMS schemas. Secondary indexes are explained, with the pros and cons of the local and global options. There's some material on the internal architecture of DynamoDB, which is interesting but perhaps not directly relevant. More advanced topics include backup and restore, change data capture (CDC) streams, caching and multi-region operations. The final chapter on migrations is particularly practical, including some cases where DynamoDB may not be a good option. This book feels like it fills a gap in the market, and gives a pretty good grounding on the database.