December 2, 2007

Amazon Dynamo — when primary key access is enough

Amazon has a very decentralized technical operation. But even the individual pieces have interestingly huge scale. Thus, various different things they’re doing are of interest.

They recently presented a research paper on a high-performance transactional system called Dynamo. (Hat tip to Dare Obasanjo.) A key point is the following:

There are many services on Amazon’s platform that only need primary-key access to a data store. For many services, such as those that provide best seller lists, shopping carts, customer preferences, session management, sales rank, and product catalog, the common pattern of using a relational database would lead to inefficiencies and limit scale and availability. Dynamo provides a simple primary-key only interface to meet the requirements of these applications.

Now, I don’t think too many organizations past Amazon are going to decide that they can’t afford the overhead of an RDBMS for such OLTP-like applications. But I do think it will become increasingly common to find other reasons to eschew traditional OLTP relational architectures. Maybe you’ll want the schema flexibility of XML. Or perhaps you’ll be happy with a fixed relational schema, but will want to optimize for analytic performance.

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One Response to “Amazon Dynamo — when primary key access is enough”

  1. Amazon SimpleDB – when less is, supposedly, enough | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on November 3rd, 2013 10:23 am

    […] super-high-end user — doing transactional object caching with ObjectStore, building an inhouse less-than-DBMS called Dynamo, or just generally adopting a very DBMS2-like approach to data management. Now Amazon is bring the […]

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