Introduction to Amazon DynamoDB

WHAT IS AMAZON DynamoDB?

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. DynamoDB lets you offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling a distributed database so that you don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, or cluster scaling.

With DynamoDB, you can create database tables that can store and retrieve any amount of data and serve any level of request traffic. You can scale up or scale down your tables’ throughout capability without downtime or performance degradation. You can use the AWS Management Console to monitor resource utilization and performance metrics.

DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for your tables over a sufficient number of servers to handle your throughput and storage requirements, while maintaining consistent and fast performance. All of your data is stored on solid-state disks (SSDs) and is automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones in an AWS Region, providing built-in high availability and data durability.

CORE COMPONENTS OF AMAZON DynamoDB

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.

The following are the basic of DynamoDB components:

• Tables — Similar to other database systems, DynamoDB stores data in tables. A table is a collection of data. For example, see the example table called People that you could use to store personal contact information about friends. family, or anyone else of interest. You could also have a Cars table to store information about vehicles that people drive.
• Items — Each table contains zero or more items. An item is a group of attributes that is uniquely identifiable among all of other items. In the People table, each item represents a person. For a Cars table, each items represents one vehicle. Items in DynamoDB are similar in many ways to rows, records, or tuples in other database systems. In DynamoDB, there is no limit to the number of items you ca store in a table.
• Attributes — Each item is composed of one or more attributes. An attribute is a fundamental data element, something that doesn’t need to be broken down any further. For a Department table, an item might have attributes such as DepartmentID, Name, Manager, and so on. Attributes in DynamoDB are similar in many ways to fields or columns in other database systems.

SECURITY WITH AMAZON DynamoDB

DynamoDB also offers encryption at rest, which eliminates the operational burden and complexity involved in protecting sensitive data.