

Ask HN: Is anyone using Amazon DynamoDB? - matt2000

It seems interesting, is used by Amazon in production and just had its price significantly reduced. Can anyone give some real world usage info? Thanks!
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jedberg
I just used it. I needed to do some analysis on Netflix streaming data (about
700 million rows in my dataset).

I had a bunch of text files that are basically logs, so I wrote a parer that
injected or updated each row in DynamoDB and then put a queue item into an SQS
queue to process that row if it was new (since the same ID could show up in
any number of log files).

After the initial parsing I ran the other script to do the actual work by
sucking items off the queue and processing the rows, which at that point had a
column for each log line for that ID.

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matt2000
Just for interest sake what language were you working in?

~~~
jedberg
Python (using the boto library to interact with AWS).

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webdevtom
This blog post came out this week.
[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/03/dynamodb-one-
yea...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/03/dynamodb-one-year-
later.html)

We prototyped some stuff with it at Lytro but didn't release the
functionality. There is a bit of a learning curve to it. You really need to
understand what you want to use it for before you start creating things with
it.

~~~
matt2000
Thanks. Am I right in thinking its basically bigtable?

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ddorian43
from a quick look it has many differences>64KB max value, no versions, no
timestamps, no compressions?, no access groups?

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manidoraisamy
I found it very constraining. It was good as an "enhanced" key-value store.
But, if you planning to use it like a regular database, you would need SCAN,
that scans the entire table: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9206424/scan-
on-key-attri...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9206424/scan-on-key-
attribute-in-dynamodb)

