Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. Using the AWS Management Console or the AWS SDKs customers can easily launch a new Amazon DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases to AWS, so they don't have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.

# create a table (10 read and 5 write capacity units)
dynamo_db = AWS::DynamoDB.new
table = dynamo_db.tables.create('my-table', 10, 5, :hash_key => [:id, :string])
sleep 1 while table.status == :creating
table.status #=> :active

# get a table by name and specify its schema
table = dynamo_db.tables['ruby-test-2']
table.hash_key = [:id, :number]

# add an item
item = table.items.create('id' => 12345, 'foo' => 'bar')

# add attributes to an item
item.attributes.add 'category' => %w(demo), 'tags' => %w(sample item)

# update an item with mixed add, delete, update
item.attributes.update do |u|
  u.add 'colors' => %w(red)
  u.set 'category' => 'demo-category'
  u.delete 'foo'
end

# delete attributes
item.attributes.delete 'colors', 'category'

# get attributes
item.attributes.to_h
#=> {"id"=>#, "tags"=>#}

# delete an item and all of its attributes
item.delete

See the AWS SDK for Ruby documentation for more information on working with Amazon DynamoDB.

AWS::Record::Base has been refactored to support Amazon DynamoDB. To accommodate two storage backends, it has been split into AWS::Record::Model and AWS::Record::HashModel.

# use Amazon DynamoDB for ORM storage
class Product < AWS::Record::HashModel
  string_attr :name
end

# creating a new record
product = Product.new(:name => 'prod-a')
product.save

# find an existing record
product = Product.find('product-id')

# enumerate products
Product.limit(100).each do |product|
  # ...
end

AWS::Record::HashModel is very similar to the old AWS::Record::Base, but with limited scoped finders. You can find records by id, or enumerate all records with an optional limit.

The AWS::Record::Base has been renamed to AWS::Record::Model to be more consistent with AWS::Record::HashModel. Extending AWS::Record::Base is now deprecated. Sharding methods and options with "domain" in their name is now deprecated. New method and option names replace "domain" with "shard".

# deprecated usage
class Book < AWS::Record::Base
  set_domain_name 'books-1'
end
book = Book.new(:domain => 'books-2') # override default domain name
book.domain #=> 'books-2'

# new approach
class Book < AWS::Record::Model
  set_shard_name 'books-1'
end
book = Book.new(:shard => 'books-2') # override default domain name
book.shard #=> 'books-2'

Accessing tag values by the tag name method was broken and would raise a NoMethodError. This has been resolved.

# get the "role" tag from the ec2 instnace via method missing
ec2 = AWS::EC2.new
instance = ec2.instances.first
instance.tags.role #=> 'webserver'

Rails view helpers (e.g. datetime_select, date_select, time_select) post their values as multiple attributes. AWS::Record::Base would raise an error when bulk assigning a date/time attribute split into parts. This has been resolved.