DynamoDB Overview

• 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.

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

• 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' throughput capacity without downtime or performance degradation.

Tables, Items, and Attributes

• Tables:

  • DynamoDB stores data in tables.

  • A table is a collection of data.

  • For example, a Cars table could be used 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 the other items.

  • In DynamoDB, there is no limit to the number of items you can store in a table.

  • For a Cars table, each item represents one vehicle.

• Attributes:

  • Each item is composed of one or more attributes.

  • An attribute is a fundamental data element, something that does not need to be broken down any further.

  • Attributes in DynamoDB are similar in many ways to fields or columns in other database systems.

  • For example, in the Cars table, attributes could be: Number of doors, Colour, Height, Width, etc.

Primary Key

• When you create a table, in addition to the table name, you must specify the primary key of the table.

  • The primary key uniquely identifies each item in the table, so that no two items can have the same key.