Tag: databases - Jeremy Daly

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.

How to switch from RDBMS to DynamoDB in 20 easy steps…

Posted in How To & Serverless on June 9, 2019
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

I posted a thread on Twitter with some thoughts on how to how to switch from RDBMS to DynamoDB. Some people have asked me to turn it into a blog post to make it easier to follow. So here it is… with some bonus steps at the end. Enjoy! 😁

I've been spending a lot of time lately with @dynamodb in my #serverless applications, so I thought I'd share my surefire guide to migrating to it from #RDBMS. So here is…

How to switch from RDBMS to #DynamoDB in *20* easy steps… (a thread)

— Jeremy Daly (@jeremy_daly) June 7, 2019

Takeaways from ServerlessNYC 2018

Posted in Serverless on November 4, 2018
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

I had the opportunity to attend ServerlessNYC this week (a ServerlessDays community conference) and had an absolutely amazing time. The conference was really well-organized (thanks Iguazio), the speakers were great, and I was able to have some very interesting (and enlightening) conversations with many attendees and presenters. In this post I’ve summarized some of the key takeaways from the event as well as provided some of my own thoughts.

Note: There were several talks that were focused on a specific product or service. While I found these talks to be very interesting, I didn’t include them in this post. I tried to cover the topics and lessons that can be applied to serverless in general.

Update November 16, 2018: Some videos have been posted, so I’ve provided the links to them.

Audio Version:

How To: Manage RDS Connections from AWS Lambda Serverless Functions

Posted in How To, Programming & Serverless on April 4, 2018
Last Updated: March 30, 2020

Someone asked a great question on my How To: Reuse Database Connections in AWS Lambda post about how to end the unused connections left over by expired Lambda functions:

I’m playing around with AWS lambda and connections to an RDS database and am finding that for the containers that are not reused the connection remains. I found before that sometimes the connections would just die eventually. I was wondering, is there some way to manage and/or end the connections without needing to wait for them to end on their own? The main issue I’m worried about is that these unused connections would remain for an excessive amount of time and prevent new connections that will actually be used from being made due to the limit on the number of connections.

🧟‍♂️ Zombie RDS connections leftover on container expiration can become a problem when you start to reach a high number of concurrent Lambda executions. My guess is that this is why AWS is launching Aurora Serverless, to deal with relational databases at scale. ~~At the time of this writing it is still in preview mode.~~

Update September 2, 2018: I wrote an NPM module that manages MySQL connections for you in serverless environments. Check it out here.

Update August 9, 2018: Aurora Serverless is now Generally Available!

Overall, I’ve found that Lambda is pretty good about closing database connections when the container expires, but even if it does it reliably, it still doesn’t solve the MAX CONNECTIONS problem. Here are several strategies that I’ve used to deal with this issue.

How To: Normalize URLs Stored in MySQL

Posted in How To & Programming on March 16, 2018

I came across an interesting problem the other day. As part of our URL normalization strategy at AlertMe, we have been adding a trailing slash to URLs without file extensions. We did a lot of research when deciding on this tactic and the general consensus around the web was to use trailing slashes for directories and (obviously) no slashes on filenames. See this article from the official Google Webmasters blog: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html (I know it’s old, but the concept is still relevant).

We even tested a number of publisher URLs to see what their redirection strategies were. Every one we tested responded correctly to both the slash and no-slash versions of the URL. Some redirected to a trailing slash, some redirected to no trailing slash, but they all returned (or redirected to) the intended page.

How To: Install phpMyAdmin on Amazon Linux

Posted in How To on May 17, 2015
Last Updated: April 28, 2017

I’ve been managing a few small MySQL databases lately that often need record updates but certainly don’t warrant building a separate management interface. The easiest way to accomplish this (assuming you don’t have complicated joins and relationships) is to install phpMyAdmin, a robust, web-based admin utility for MySQL that is built in php. In my case, I’m running these mostly on Amazon Linux instances, so after a little poking around, it turns out the installation is just 3 simple steps.