Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 14, 2012

CloudSpokes Coding Challenge Winners – Build a DynamoDB Demo

Filed under: Amazon DynamoDB,Amazon Web Services AWS,Contest,Dynamo — Patrick Durusau @ 6:27 pm

CloudSpokes Coding Challenge Winners – Build a DynamoDB Demo

From the post:

Last November CloudSpokes was invited to participate in the DynamoDB private beta. We spent some time kicking the tires, participating in the forums and developing use cases for their Internet-scale NoSQL database service. We were really excited about the possibilities of DynamoDB and decided to crowdsource some challenge ideas from our 38,000 strong developer community. Needless to say, the release generated quite a bit of buzz.

When Amazon released DynamoDB in January, we launched our CloudSpokes challenge Build an #Awesome Demo with Amazon DynamoDB along with a blog post and a sample ”Kiva Loan Browser Demo” application to get people started. The challenge requirements were wide open and all about creating the coolest application using Amazon DynamoDB. We wanted to see what the crowd could come up with.

The feedback we received from numerous developers was extremely positive. The API was very straightforward and easy to work with. The SDKs and docs, as usual, were top-notch. Developers were able to get up to speed fast as DynamoDB’s simple storage and query methods were easy to grasp. These methods allowed developers to store and access data items with a flexible number of attributes using the simple “Put” or “Get” verbs that they are familiar with. No surprise here, but we had a number of comments regarding the speed of both read and write operations.

When our challenge ended a week later we were pleasantly surprised with the applications and chose to highlight the following top five:

I don’t think topic maps has 38,000 developers but challenges do seem to pull people out of the woodwork.

Any thoughts on what would make interesting/attractive challenges? Other than five figure prizes? 😉

April 6, 2012

Amazon DynamoDB Libraries, Mappers, and Mock Implementations Galore!

Filed under: Amazon DynamoDB,Amazon Web Services AWS — Patrick Durusau @ 6:50 pm

Amazon DynamoDB Libraries, Mappers, and Mock Implementations Galore!

From the post:

Today’s guest blogger is Dave Lang, Product Manager of the DynamoDB team, who has a great list of tools and SDKs that will allow you to use DynamoDB from just about any language or environment.

While you are learning AWS, you may as well take a look at the DynamoDB.

Comments on any of these resources? I just looked at them briefly but they seemed quite, err, uneven.

I understand wanting to thank everyone who made an effort but on the other hand, I think AWS customers would be well served by a top coder’s type list of products. X% of the top 100 AWS projects use Y. That sort of thing.

April 2, 2012

The Total Cost of (Non) Ownership of a NoSQL Database Service

Filed under: Amazon DynamoDB,Amazon Web Services AWS,Cloud Computing — Patrick Durusau @ 5:47 pm

The Total Cost of (Non) Ownership of a NoSQL Database Service

From the post:

We have received tremendous positive feedback from customers and partners since we launched Amazon DynamoDB two months ago. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster while only paying for the actual system resources they consume. We also received a ton of great feedback about how simple it is get started and how easy it is to scale the database. Since Amazon DynamoDB introduced the new concept of a provisioned throughput pricing model, we also received several questions around how to think about its Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

We are very excited to publish our new TCO whitepaper: The Total Cost of (Non) Ownership of a NoSQL Database service. Download PDF.

I bet you can guess how the numbers work out without reading the PDF file. 😉

Makes me wonder though if there would be a market for a different hosted NoSQL database or topic map application? Particularly a topic map application.

Not along the lines of Maiana but more of a topic based data set, which could respond to data by merging it with already stored data. Say for example a firefighter scans the bar code on a railroad car lying alongside the tracks with fire getting closer. The only think they want is a list of the necessary equipment and whether to leave now, or not.

Most preparedness agencies would be well pleased to simply pay for the usage they get of such a topic map.

January 26, 2012

AWS HowTo: Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce with DynamoDB

Filed under: Amazon DynamoDB,Amazon Web Services AWS,MapReduce — Patrick Durusau @ 6:44 pm

AWS HowTo: Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce with DynamoDB by Adam Gray. Adam is a Product Manager on the Elastic MapReduce Team.

From the post:

Apache Hadoop and NoSQL databases are complementary technologies that together provide a powerful toolbox for managing, analyzing, and monetizing Big Data. That’s why we were so excited to provide out-of-the-box Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) integration with Amazon DynamoDB, providing customers an integrated solution that eliminates the often prohibitive costs of administration, maintenance, and upfront hardware. Customers can now move vast amounts of data into and out of DynamoDB, as well as perform sophisticated analytics on that data, using EMR’s highly parallelized environment to distribute the work across the number of servers of their choice. Further, as EMR uses a SQL-based engine for Hadoop called Hive, you need only know basic SQL while we handle distributed application complexities such as estimating ideal data splits based on hash keys, pushing appropriate filters down to DynamoDB, and distributing tasks across all the instances in your EMR cluster.

In this article, I’ll demonstrate how EMR can be used to efficiently export DynamoDB tables to S3, import S3 data into DynamoDB, and perform sophisticated queries across tables stored in both DynamoDB and other storage services such as S3.

Time to get that AWS account!

January 18, 2012

Amazon DynamoDB

Filed under: Amazon DynamoDB,Amazon Web Services AWS — Patrick Durusau @ 7:58 pm

Amazon DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications by Werner Vogels.

From the post:

Today is a very exciting day as we release Amazon DynamoDB, a fast, highly reliable and cost-effective NoSQL database service designed for internet scale applications. DynamoDB is the result of 15 years of learning in the areas of large scale non-relational databases and cloud services. Several years ago we published a paper on the details of Amazon’s Dynamo technology, which was one of the first non-relational databases developed at Amazon. The original Dynamo design was based on a core set of strong distributed systems principles resulting in an ultra-scalable and highly reliable database system. Amazon DynamoDB, which is a new service, continues to build on these principles, and also builds on our years of experience with running non-relational databases and cloud services, such as Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3, at scale. It is very gratifying to see all of our learning and experience become available to our customers in the form of an easy-to-use managed service.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast performance at any scale. Today’s web-based applications often encounter database scaling challenges when faced with growth in users, traffic, and data. With Amazon DynamoDB, developers scaling cloud-based applications can start small with just the capacity they need and then increase the request capacity of a given table as their app grows in popularity. Their tables can also grow without limits as their users store increasing amounts of data. Behind the scenes, Amazon DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for a table over a sufficient number of servers to meet the request capacity specified by the customer. Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average service-side in the single-digit milliseconds. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability.

Impressive numbers and I am sure this is impressive software.

Two questions: Werner starts off talking about “internet scale” and then in the second paragraph says there is “…fast performance at any scale.”

Does anybody know what “internet scale” means? If they said U.S. Census scale, where I know software has been developed for record linkage on billion row tables, then I might have some idea of what is meant. If you know or can point to someone who does, please comment.

Second question: So if I need the Amazon DynamoDB because it handles “internet scale,” why would I need it for something less? My wife needs a car to go back and forth to work, but that doesn’t mean she needs a Hummer. Yes? I would rather choose a tool that is fit for the intended purpose. If you know a sensible break point for choosing the Amazon DynamoDB, please comment.

Disclosure: I buy books and other stuff at Amazon. But I don’t think my purchases past, present or future have influenced my opinions in this post. 😉

First seen at: myNoSQL as: Amazon DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications.

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