AWS Database Blog

Tag: DynamoDB

Simulating Amazon DynamoDB unique constraints using transactions

Most relational database systems—and some non-relational database systems—have a construct known as a unique key or a unique constraint. This feature ensures that all values in a column or field are unique across rows. For example, if you have a User table, you might have a UUID as a primary key that uniquely identifies each […]

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 […]

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

September2022: This post was reviewed for accuracy. 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 and augmented reality Checkout and order processing in ecommerce Real-time stock pricing and trading […]

How to design Amazon DynamoDB global secondary indexes

Back in college, I created entity-relationship diagrams to model the system requirements of a relational database. The process involved finding all of the entities of the software system and defining relationships among them. I then modeled the relationships and entities into database tables before deciding which queries the database had to support. This method of […]