AWS Database Blog

Category: Amazon DynamoDB

Refactoring to Amazon DynamoDB

July 2023: This post was reviewed for accuracy. Do you want to move from a relational database to NoSQL? In the following post, I walk you through reading, transforming, and writing SQL Server data from an Amazon EC2 instance to Amazon DynamoDB. I use AWS Glue to transform the source data model of multiple tables […]

A walkthrough of the Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator console – Part 2

Amazon DynamoDB provides scalability and performance where response times are measured in single-digit milliseconds. For use cases requiring response times in microseconds, DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is the service that helps deliver that. DAX is a managed cache that is API compatible with DynamoDB  providing fast in-memory performance for demanding applications like real-time gaming, bidding, weather […]

Optimize Amazon DynamoDB scan latency through schema design

In this post, we demonstrate how Amazon DynamoDB table structure can affect scan performance and offer techniques for optimizing table scan times. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database that allows for a flexible schema. This means that items in the same table may differ from each other in terms of what attributes are present for each […]

How SimilarWeb moved to Amazon DynamoDB from Couchbase and saved 70%

This is a guest blog post by Doron Grinzaig, a software developer at SimilarWeb, in partnership with AWS solutions architect, Leonid Koren, and AWS senior technical account manager, Ziv Shenhav. NoSQL databases are a great fit for many modern mobile, web, and gaming applications that require scalable, flexible, and highly functional databases. However, NoSQL databases by […]

Amazon DynamoDB: Ad tech use cases and design patterns

Advertising technology (ad tech) companies use Amazon DynamoDB to store various kinds of marketing data, such as user profiles, user events, clicks, and visited links. Some of the uses include real-time bidding (RTB), ad targeting, and attribution. In this blog post, I identify the most common use cases and design patterns of ad tech companies […]

Amazon DynamoDB: Gaming use cases and design patterns

Gaming companies use Amazon DynamoDB in all parts of game platforms, including game state, player data, session history, and leaderboards. The main benefits that these companies get from DynamoDB are its ability to scale reliably to millions of concurrent users and requests while ensuring consistently low latency—measured in single-digit milliseconds. In addition, as a fully […]

Understanding Amazon DynamoDB encryption by using AWS Key Management Service and analysis of API calls with Amazon Athena

As applications evolve to be more scalable for the web, customers are adopting flexible data structures and database engines for their use cases. Using NoSQL data stores has become increasing popular because of NoSQL’s flexible data model for building modern applications. Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service that can provide consistent […]

Tuning AWS Java SDK HTTP request settings for latency-aware Amazon DynamoDB applications

October 2024: This post was reviewed for accuracy. Additional guidance was added about the trade-offs between high and low timeout settings. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL cloud database service that is designed to provide low-latency and high-throughput performance for applications and services running at scale. Example use cases include: Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) Virtual […]