I always tell people there are two clear areas where DynamoDB has some major benefits:
- Very high scale applications that can be tough for an RDBMS to handle
- Serverless applications (e.g. w/ AWS Lambda) due to how the connection model (and other factors) work better with that model.
Then, for about 80% of OLTP applications, you can choose either DynamoDB or RDBMS, and it really comes down to which tradeoffs you prefer.
DynamoDB will give you consistent, predictable performance basically forever, and there's not the long-term maintenance drag of tuning your database as your usage grows. The downside, as others have mentioned, is more planning upfront and some loss of flexibility.
One difference with DynamoDB is that there's no query planner, so you can have a pretty good sense of how many items you'll hit and how big that read is.
Question for you -- what are the performance implications of "re-keying" my records during the transform? Should I try to keep the same key for my transformed record as from my original record so that they align with the same partitions, or are they likely going to get sent to different partitions across different brokers anyway?
- Very high scale applications that can be tough for an RDBMS to handle
- Serverless applications (e.g. w/ AWS Lambda) due to how the connection model (and other factors) work better with that model.
Then, for about 80% of OLTP applications, you can choose either DynamoDB or RDBMS, and it really comes down to which tradeoffs you prefer.
DynamoDB will give you consistent, predictable performance basically forever, and there's not the long-term maintenance drag of tuning your database as your usage grows. The downside, as others have mentioned, is more planning upfront and some loss of flexibility.