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Comment by DVassallo | Hacker News Reader

If you treat DynamoDB as a DBMS, you’re going to be disappointed (for the reasons you mention). But if you think of it as a highly-durable immediately-consistent btree in the cloud, it’s amazing. DynamoDB is closer to Redis than MySQL. Amazon does it a disservice by putting it in the databases category.

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The indexes are not immediately consistent.

Its not just that it is put in the database category, but that its champions at AWS make statements like "if you are utilising RDBMS you are living in the past", or that "there are very few use cases to choose Postgres over DynamoDB".

Btw, loved your AWS book!.

DynamoDb is like redis without the fun data structures, the fantastic cli and discoverability, the usefull configurable tradeoff between fast and consistent, and really much-needed features s.a listing your keys.

So my quarantine project is building a Redis API on top of DynamoDB - https://github.com/sudhirj/redimo.go

Daniel, I'm a big fan of yours but disagree with this take :).

It's definitely a database. The modeling principles are different, and you won't get some of the niceties you get with a RDBMS, but it still allows for flexible querying and more.

S3 is not a database, but DynamoDB is :).

S3 and DDB are incredibly similar. Their fundamental operators are the same: key-value get/put and ordered list, and their consistency is roughly the same.

What differentiates DDB and S3 the most is cost and performance.

They're both highly-durable primitive data structures in the cloud, with a few extra features attached.

If you think of them as incredibly similar then you are likely not making very good use of them.

For example consistency is not "roughly the same" with DynamoDB supporting strongly consistent and atomic operations, and atomic update operations.

S3 is also immediately consistent unless you’re updating an existing object or listing objects.

I was one of the top users by volume of both products when I worked at AWS.

I agree. DynamoDB is like a serverless child of Redis and MongoDB.

> If you treat DynamoDB as a DBMS, you’re going to be disappointed

Did you mean to say "as a RDBMS"? Because I don't see how it's not a DBMS.

No, I meant a DBMS. Almost all the things you'd expect in a DBMS are not there. Take a look at most of the comments in this thread. Everyone expecting DBMS things, and complaining that they're not there.

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