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Comment by bigtunacan

3 years ago

You're not wrong. Probably more than 95% of applications will never outgrow one large relational database. I just think that this leads to an unfortunate, but mostly inevitable issue of complexity for the few that do hit such a level of success and scale.

Alex DeVrie (author of 'The DynamoDB Book') discusses that his approach is to essentially start all new projects with DynamoDB.

Now I don't really agree with him, yet I can't fully say he's wrong either. While we won't need it most of the time, reaching for a tool like this before we need it provides more time to really understand it when/if we reach that point.

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bigtunacan

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bigtunacan  3 years ago

@ithrow, yeah I know he is clearly biased which is why I don't really agree with him. I do however think it would have helped me to start using/learning before I needed it since the paradigm is so foreign to the relational model that is now second nature.

  • Aeolun  3 years ago

    DynamoDB (and Mongo) is nice, right up until you need those relations. I haven’t found a document oriented database that gives me the consistency guarantees of a RDBMS yet.

    • loxias  3 years ago

      Would a hybrid key-value & document store, indices on any user defined path, with optional strong consistency DWYW?

    • jd_mongodb  3 years ago

      You must not have looked at MongoDB. We have been delivering fully consistent ACID transactions since 4.0 which shipped several years. Yes, Jepsen did find some issues with the initial release of ACID transactions and yes, we fixed those problems pretty rapidly.

      6 replies →

    • bigtunacan  3 years ago

      It's been a long time since I've used Mongo so I don't know if it only supports eventual consistency, but DynamoDB does support transactions and traditional consistency, but it comes at the cost of reduced read throughput.

      DynamoDB also supports relations, but they aren't called relations because they don't resemble anything like relations in traditional relational databases.

      You may already know this, but just to clarify DynamoDB isn't really a document oriented database. It's both a key/value database and a columnar database, so in that sense I'd closer to Redis and Cassandra than Mongo, but there's definitely a lot of misinformation on this front.