Comment by rednafi

Comment by rednafi 4 days ago

4 replies

No, thank you. DynamoDB promotes a terrible dev workflow, and there’s no way around it. It’s like embedding S3 directly into your application code.

The client libraries are gigantic, and the documentation is misleading at times. Plus, Dynamo expects your access patterns to be static, which isn’t true most of the time. Hyperscaling is great, but many aren’t willing to give up everything else just for that.

UltraSane 3 days ago

I tried using it once and designing a schema for it makes relational databases seem fun by comparison.

  • rednafi 3 days ago

    Relational databases are indeed fun. There's no such thing as schemaless data; the schema either lives in your database or in your code. In the case of Dynamo, the schema lives in your code, determined by your access patterns. The problem is that access patterns change, and this state of extreme denormalization is difficult to adapt to evolving business requirements.

    • UltraSane 2 days ago

      Schemas are a lot easier to modify in code. As a network admin I have spent many hours using solarwinds and directly using SQL to query the database and it is a non-normalized mess of duplicate fields. They have MAC addresses stored in 10 different places in 4 different formats. I think the reason for this is that they simply can't easily change existing tables so have to create new ones.

    • Kinrany 3 days ago

      Schemaless and denormalized are orthogonal qualities