Mastering DynamoDB Kindle Edition

First the good things:- Limitations (e.g. 10GB table max size when using local indexes, max item size of 400KB, etc.)- A nice enumeration of interesting libraries (transaction libraries, geo libraries, etc.)Now the many, many bad things:- LOTs of wasted space showing the same query API in 4 different programming languages- Wasted space showing architecture diagrams that essentially repeat previous chapters -- and do so for essentially the same exact type of web architectures- No depth on the internals of DynamoDB; I understand that this is AWS proprietary software, but the author did not even take a practical approach to discuss things that other DBs do; for example, I come from a MySQL world where heuristics such as no DB over 1TB since performance can degrade beyond this point, not using foreign keys because they make online schema changes hard, etc. are all lessons learned from years of battle-tested DBA experience; I'd hope for the same lessons in a book dedicated to DynamoDBSave your money and try and read articles and watch YouTube or maybe wait for a better book.

Either book was rushed and/or review was poor. One too many confusing statements that'll force you to go online to make sense of the topic anyway. Used the book as more of an outline rather than an in-depth analysis into Dynamodb. Most of the content seems bloated/irrelevant in order to fill up pages.

Databases are very much in the spotlight lately and especially the NoSQL breed. While there are dozens of offerings on the market only a handful tops the list, one such offspring in the key-value area is Amazon's DynamoDB. Being a close relative to such popular players on this arena as Redis or Voldemort DynamoDB I figured has many unique points, add-ons and a strong backing by the user community, not only the mighty Amazon corporation. Mastering DynamoDB as a book came out at a very strategic time.It is a great technical read, too. Tanmay (the author) walks you gently into the wonderful NoSQL database world. Then the book takes you, arm with DynamoDB, and make a fearless traveller sailing through high seas of today’s turbulent and fierce data streams and make you prowl the dark alleys of handling the data in the Cloud.The book is structured so it devotes its several first chapters to the nitty-gritties of the DynamoDB and then explains on best practices and best usage scenarios. The book has an advanced chapter for those who like the extremes. For example relational integrity is suddenly discussed in a book about NoSQL (no schema or structure supposed to be there the core, alas not so fast). The book tastefully ends with an overview of the top 10 or so of the sheer third party offerings from either Amazon itself or GitHubers.The best one I liked is the local DynamoDB and the ability to conduct transactions. The module that allows to scale the database appeared to be very much of value, but frankly I was surprised it is not written by Amazon itself. To say more, the design decision of having a developer (or perhaps an admin) being responsible for assigning and provisioning compute throughput for each table made my eyebrows raise.The author appeared very savvy in the subject of Cloud Data (perhaps I coined it), I actually learned quite a few interesting techniques and found out that Amazon has SLAs for each component, even for their internal systems and especially such a crucial piece as DynamoDB. And they are tight SLAs. Yet, make a lot of sense to me. Nobody argues Amazon does not successfully process huge volumes of data, fast.Anyway, I liked the book and the author much, heck, perhaps even more than the DynamoDB as a database itself.

This book has poor editing and concepts are not clearly explained. After the confusing description of Hash and Range keys in chapter 2, I put the book away and instead followed a DynamoDB tutorial on youtube and also the hands on tutorial in the Dynamo DB Local Javascript Shell.

Mastering DynamoDB is a medium level introduction to most of the features, uses cases and concepts of DynamoDB. The only obvious omission is that configuration with Cloudformation is not covered, however you could argue that this is best left to a book covering Cloudformation.The section I found most valuable was the third party tools which fill useful gaps not covered by DynamoDB itself at the moment. Given the range of coverage I would expect that most people will find useful pieces of information unless they already have comprehensive experience with DynamoDB.The main weakness is the colloquial and conversational style. This along with a lack of diagrams made the indexing section hard to follow. I would have liked to see more diagrams showing the index designs along with more succinct language. I found Amazon's description of indexing to be clearer than Mastering DynamoDB.