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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

DynamoDB is great if you want to fork over a lot of money to AWS on a monthly basis. It's inability to allow you to query on arbitrary attributes/fields without creating a separate index (i.e. copy of the entire collection) is mind-boggling. There are so many better, less expensive options out there for 99.99999% of use-cases. Friends don't let friends use DynamoDB.

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> It's inability to allow you to query on arbitrary attributes/fields without creating a separate index (i.e. copy of the entire collection) is mind-boggling.

This attitude of everybody is incompetent at <Big Company>...I need to teach them, is what is mind-boggling.

Your statement misunderstands the design principles of a system like this one or others similar. It's precisely those design principles that led to not allowing to run arbitrary queries on the backend.

You are trying to optimize for the 99.9th percentiles at massive scale...

No, it's the morons who pick a technology (in this case DynamoDB) without understanding it is the wrong tool for the job at hand, leaving the rest of us holding the bag for years on end for their poor choice of tools.

Hey Skinny,

What kind of system/application/query pattern does DynamoDB optimize for that relational databases are worse options for?

I'm legitimately ignorant and a lot of people seem to dislike it. I remember thinking that running queries in JSON seemed silly. Heh.

My name is Marco Inaros!

> What kind of system/application/query pattern does DynamoDB optimize for

Start here:

"Real-world use cases for Amazon DynamoDB" - https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/REPEAT_1_Real-...

> I'm legitimately ignorant and a lot of people seem to dislike it.

Start here:

"AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB " - https://youtu.be/HaEPXoXVf2k

Then:

"Build with DynamoDB | S1 E5 – A Data Modeling Use Case Deep Dive" - https://youtu.be/mcZwJQ7O8iw

"Model hierarchical automotive component data using Amazon DynamoDB" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/model-hierarchical-aut...

"AWS re:Invent 2024 - Advanced data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB" - https://youtu.be/hjqrDqVaiw0

Not my experience at all. The DX is different, but not bad in my, and it has been extremely reliable and inexpensive for my use cases and workloads. I built mainstream stuff and a global multi-region replicated DDB table with backups is essentially free.

That said, I don’t do query time aggregation anymore, which seems to be a common challenge folks hit. Other approaches that implement streaming/incremental aggregation and make it look roughly like query time probably are simpler.

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