Databases - Jeremy Daly

Ensuring Data Integrity with DynamoDB

Posted in Databases, DynamoDB & Serverless on December 16, 2021

DynamoDB is an incredibly powerful NoSQL database. It’s schema-less, which gives you lots of flexibility, but it also means that you are responsible for managing the integrity of your data. This includes ensuring the structure of your data, as well as the ability to preserve metadata throughout your data’s lifecycle.

Unfortunately, DynamoDB doesn’t currently store any metadata associated with items. If you want to know when a particular item was written to the table, for example, you have to store that information yourself. While it’s not particularly difficult to add these attributes to an item, maintaining their integrity can come with some challenges.

In this article, we’ll discuss several strategies that can be used to ensure data integrity in your DynamoDB tables.

12 Important Lessons from The DynamoDB Book

Posted in Databases & Serverless on April 16, 2020

Fellow serverless advocate, and AWS Data Hero, Alex DeBrie, recently released The DynamoDB Book, which ventures way beyond the basics of DynamoDB, but still offers an approachable and useful resource for developers of any experience level. I had the opportunity to read the book and then speak with Alex about it on Serverless Chats. We discussed several really important lessons from the book that every DynamoDB practitioner needs to know. Here are twelve of my favorites, in no particular order.

Takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2019’s Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns (DAT403)

Posted in Databases & Serverless on December 7, 2019
Last Updated: December 20, 2020

AWS re:Invent 2019 is a wrap, but now the real work begins! There are hundreds of session videos now available on YouTube. So when you have a few days (or weeks) of downtime, you can dig in to these amazing talks and learn about whatever AWS topics you fancy.

I was only able to attend a few talks this year, but one that I knew I couldn’t miss in person, was Rick Houlihan’s DAT403: Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns. At the last two re:Invents, he gave similar talks that explored how to use single-table designs in DynamoDB… and they blew my mind! 🤯 These videos were so mind-bending, that they inspired me to immerse myself in NoSQL design and write my How to switch from RDBMS to DynamoDB in 20 easy steps post. I was hoping to have a similar experience with this year’s edition, and I WAS NOT DISAPPOINTED.

As expected, it was a 60 minute firehose of #NoSQL knowledge bombs. There was A LOT to take away from this, so after the session, I wrote a Twitter thread that included some really interesting lessons that stuck out to me. The video has been posted, so definitely watch it (maybe like 10 times 🤷‍♂️), and use it to get started (or continue on) your DynamoDB journey.