Author: Jason Hunter

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale. DynamoDB recently launched a new feature: Incremental export to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). You can use incremental exports to update your downstream systems regularly using only the changed data. You no longer need to do a […]

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multi-Region, multi-active, durable database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. In 2020, DynamoDB introduced a feature to export DynamoDB table data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with […]

If you’re using Amazon DynamoDB tables with provisioned capacity, one challenge you might face is how best to handle a sudden request traffic increase (spike) without being throttled. The more sudden and extended the traffic spike, the more likely a table will experience throttles. However, throttles aren’t inevitable even for spiky traffic. Here we walk you through eight designs to handle traffic spikes, and present their advantages and disadvantages.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. Every table in DynamoDB has a schema which specifies if it has a simple partition key (for pure key-value lookups), or a partition key and sort key both (for more complex query patterns). You use these […]

Your Amazon DynamoDB table might store millions, billions, or even trillions of items. If you ever need to perform a bulk update action against items in a large table, it’s important to consider the cost. In this post, I show you three techniques for cost-effective in-place bulk processing with DynamoDB. Characteristics of bulk processing You […]

Amazon DynamoDB sends metrics about its operations to Amazon CloudWatch. At the time of this writing, the list includes 33 metrics including: throughput consumed and provisioned, account and table limits, request latencies, system errors, and user errors. Two metrics not included are the DynamoDB table size and item count. These values can be observed in […]

When developing applications, you often need to implement a counter to accurately track actions such as votes cast, the available quantity of a resource in an eCommerce store, or tickets available for an event. These counters must be updated as the resource quantity changes. In this post, we explore seven approaches to implementing resource counters […]

In Part 1 of this series, you learned about Amazon DynamoDB data loading strategies and the behavior of DynamoDB during short runs. In Part 2, you learned about query performance and the adaptive behavior of DynamoDB during sustained activity. In this third and final post, we review what you’ve learned, plus offer a few additional […]

In the Part 1 of this series, you learned about Amazon DynamoDB data loading strategies and the behavior of DynamoDB during short runs. In this post, you learn about query performance and the adaptive behavior of DynamoDB during sustained activity. Querying To drive traffic at arbitrarily large rates and simulate real-world behavior, we need a […]

The general rule with Amazon DynamoDB is to choose a high cardinality partition key. But why; and what happens if you don’t? Inspired by a customer use case, we dive deep into this question and explore the performance of loading and querying DynamoDB using different partition key designs and table settings. After each experiment, we […]