Amazon DynamoDB

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.

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, and use the AWS Management Console to monitor resource utilization and performance metrics.

DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for your tables over a sufficient number of servers to handle your throughput and storage requirements, while maintaining consistent and fast performance. All of your data is stored on solid state disks (SSDs) and automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones in an AWS region, providing built-in high availability and data durability.

Tables, Items, and Attributes
In Amazon DynamoDB, a table is a collection of items and each item is a collection of attributes. Each attribute in an item is a name-value pair. An attribute can be a scalar (single-valued), a JSON document, or a set.

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.
DynamoDB supports two different kinds of primary keys:

• Partition Key – A simple primary key, composed of one attribute known as the partition key. DynamoDB uses the partition key's value as input to an internal hash function; the output from the hash function determines the partition where the item will be stored. No two items in a table can have the same partition key value.
• Partition Key and Sort Key – A composite primary key, composed of two attributes. The first attribute is the partition key, and the second attribute is the sort key. DynamoDB uses the partition key value as input to an internal hash function; the output from the hash function determines the partition where the item will be stored. All items with the same partition key are stored together, in sorted order by sort key value. It is possible for two items to have the same partition key value, but those two items must have different sort key values.

Secondary Indexes
DynamoDB supports two kinds of secondary indexes:

• Global secondary index – an index with a partition key and sort key that can be different from those on the table.
• Local secondary index – an index that has the same partition key as the table, but a different sort key.

DynamoDB Data Types
Amazon DynamoDB supports the following data types:

• Scalar types – Number, String, Binary, Boolean, and Null.
• Document types – List and Map.
• Set types – String Set, Number Set, and Binary Set.