Ben Bromhead (instaclustr) for High Scalability:

To determine the suitability of a provider, your first port of call is to benchmark. Choosing a service provider is often done in a number of stages. First is to shortlist providers based on capabilities and claimed performance, ruling out those that do not meet your application requirements. Second is to look for benchmarks conducted by third parties, if any. The final stage is to benchmark the service yourself.

✚ Peter Bailis asks a very valid question: if it’s the default YCSB and it’s a benchmark, where are the results?”

✚ instaclustr offers a totally managed hosting solution for Cassandra. (Disclaimer: they’ve sponsored myNoSQL in the past)

Original title and link: 5 Steps to Benchmarking Managed NoSQL - DynamoDB Vs Cassandra (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/3/5-steps-to-benchmarking-managed-nosql-dynamodb-vs-cassandra.html

Werner Vogels writes about the recent price reduction of DynamoDB

DynamoDB runs on a fleet of SSD-backed storage servers that are specifically designed to support DynamoDB. This allows us to tune both our hardware and our software to ensure that the end-to-end service is both cost-efficient and highly performant. We’ve been working hard over the past year to improve storage density and bring down the costs of our underlying hardware platform. We have also made significant improvements to our software by optimizing our storage engine, replication system and various other internal components. The DynamoDB team has a mandate to keep finding ways to reduce the cost and I am glad to see them delivering in a big way. DynamoDB has also benefited from its rapid growth, which allows us to take advantage of economies of scale. As with our other services, as we’ve made advancements that allow us to reduce our costs, we are happy to pass the savings along to you.

One thought: this could be, if it isn’t already, a great sales pitch for data appliance vendors.

You can find more details about DynamoDB’s price reduction and the new reserved capacity modle on the Amazon Web Services Blog

Original title and link: DynamoDB One Year Later: 85% Cheaper: How Is Amazon Doing It (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2013/03/dynamodb-one-year-later.html

Jeff Barr:

Until now, we’ve focused on scaling up to large tables with plenty of read and write capacity. Today, we are heading the other direction, toward more modestly sized and provisioned tables. We’ve lowered the minimum read and write capacities […]

In other words: whoever felt left outside by our initial announcements and focus is now welcome to join.

Original title and link: Amazon DynamoDB With Reduced Minimum Throughput (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/amazon-dynamodb-reduced-minimum-throughput.html

Aside from nominal data storage and data transfer fees, the costs associated with using Amazon DynamoDB are calculated based on provisioned throughput capacity and item size (see the Amazon DynamoDB pricing details). Throughput is measured in units of Read Capacity and Write Capacity. Ultimately, the throughput and costs required for your sessions table is going to be based on your website traffic, but the following is a list of the capacity units required for each session-related operation with the assumption that your sessions are less than 1KB in size:

• Reading via session_start()

  • With locking enabled: 1 unit of Write Capacity + 1 unit of Write Capacity for each time it must retry acquiring the lock

  • With locking disabed: 1 unit of Read Capacity (or 0.5 units of Read Capacity if consistent reads are disabled)

• Writing via session_write_close(): 1 unit of Write Capacity

• Deleting via session_destroy(): 1 unit of Write Capacity

• Garbage Collecting via DyanamoDBSessionHandler::garbage_collect(): 0.5 units of Read Capacity per KB of data in the sessions table + 1 unit of Write Capacity per expired item

Nice translation of PHP function calls to effective Amazon DynamoDB capacity units.

Original title and link: Calculating the Cost of Storing PHP Sessions Using Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/04/scalable-session-handling-in-php-using-amazon-dynamodb.html

A list of DynamoDB libraries covering quite a few popular languages and frameworks:

A couple of things I’ve noticed (and that could be helpful to other NoSQL database companies):

1. Amazon provides official libraries for a couple of major programming languages (Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby)
2. Amazon is not shy to promote libraries that are not official, but established themselves as good libraries (e.g. Python’s Boto)
3. The list doesn’t seem to include anything for C and Objective C (Objective C is the language of iOS and Mac apps)
   

Original title and link: DynamoDB Libraries, Mappers, and Mock Implementations (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/04/amazon-dynamodb-libraries-mappers-and-mock-implementations-galore.html

The usual getting started guide for .NET developers:

The object persistence functionality in the AWS SDK for .NET enables you to easily map .NET classes to Amazon DynamoDB items. By using your own classes to store and retrieve Amazon DynamoDB data, you can use Amazon DynamoDB without worrying about data conversion or developing middle-layer solutions that interface with the Amazon DynamoDB service.

Original title and link: DynamoDB Tutorial for .NET: Using Amazon DynamoDB Object Persistence Framework (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/2790257258340776

Daniel Lobato Garcia:

One of the hackathons I attended was about deploying a Ruby app that pushes to and retrieves records from DynamoDB, and uploading photos to S3. It involves several steps but thanks to Trevor Rowe (author of AWS SDK for Ruby) who helped me, I finally succeeded and created a implementation that works pretty nicely. […] I included some information on how you could replicate this functionality on your Rails app in this Github repository.

Just a very basic guide to how to use Amazon SDK for Ruby in a Rails app. Or as one Hacker News commenter said:

I’m not sure, but from reading the article this feels more like AWS-SDK’s seamless integration with Rails rather than Rails’ seamless integration with DynamoDB & S3. Please correct me if I misunderstood.

Original title and link: Quick Guide to Using Amazon DynamoDB and S3 With Rails (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.daniellobato.me/2012/03/rails-and-new-seamless-integration-with-amazons-dynamodb-and-s3/

Michael Hausenblas put together a list of hosted NoSQL solutions including Amazon DynamoDB and SimpleDB, Google App Engine, Riak, Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Neo4j, and OrientDB. If you go through my posts on NoSQL hosting , you’ll find a couple more.

Original title and link: NoSQL Hosting Services (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://webofdata.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/hosted-nosql/

Bitly’s new asynchronous Amazon DynamoDB Python client:

Asyncdynamo requires Boto and Tornado to be installed, and must be run with Python 2.7. It replaces Boto’s synchronous calls to Dynamo and to Amazon STS (to retrieve session tokens) with non-blocking Tornado calls. For the end user its interface seeks to mimic that of Boto Layer1, with each method now requiring an additional callback parameter.

Available on GitHub.

Original title and link: Asyncdynamo: Amazon DynamoDB Async Python Library by Bitly (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://word.bitly.com/post/18861837158/introducing-asyncdynamo