Dynamo DB — A Three Part Series…

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that lets you offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling a distributed database. In this three part series, I am going to walk you through the basics of the service and lead you to best practices that could save you some operational expense while using this service.

If you want to jump to the appropriate article, use the link below…

Part B — Know what you Pay For

Part C — Recommendations to keep your DynamoDB operational cost to a minimum

Part A — Refresher

A quick refresher

In DynamoDB, tables, items, and attributes are the core components that you work with.

A table is a collection of items and each item is a collection of attributes.

DynamoDB uses primary keys to uniquely identify each item in a table and secondary indexes to provide more querying flexibility.

• Tables — Similar to other database systems, DynamoDB stores data in tables. A table is a collection of data.
• Items — Each table contains zero or more items. An item is a group of attributes that is uniquely identifiable among all of the other items. In DynamoDB, there is no limit to the number of items you can store in a table. Items are like rows in a relational database.
• Attributes — Each item is composed of one or more attributes. An attribute is a fundamental data element, something that does not need to be broken down any further. Attributes in DynamoDB are similar in many ways to fields or columns in other database systems.

Basic structure of a DynamoDB data

• Each item in the table has a unique identifier, or primary key, that distinguishes the item from all of the others in the table.
• Other than the primary key, a table is schemaless, which means that neither the attributes nor their data types need to be defined beforehand. Each item can have its own distinct attributes.
• Most of the attributes are scalar, which means that they can have only one value. Strings and numbers are common examples of scalars.
• Some of the items have a nested…