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? 😉

March 29, 2012

Intro to Map Suite DynamoDB Extension Technology Preview

Filed under: Dynamo,Geo Analytics,Mapping — Patrick Durusau @ 6:40 pm

Intro to Map Suite DynamoDB Extension Technology Preview

Promotes Amazon’s DynamoDB, including pricing but an interesting presentation none the less.

A couple of suggestions:

The code mentioned in the presentation is unreadable. I am sure it worked at an actual presentation but doesn’t work on the web.

The extension is downloadable but requires MS Studio to be opened. Understand why there is a version for one of the more popular programming IDE’s but the product should not be restricted to that IDE.

Some resources that may be of interest:

http://thinkgeo.com/

Press Release on this extension.

Looking for feedback on the technology.

Great to be able to support GIS data robustly but the “killer” app for GIS data would be to integrate other data in real time.

For example, take a map of a major metropolitan area and integrate real time GIS coordinates from police and fire units, across jurisdictions during major public events. While at the same time integrating encounters, arrests, intelligence reports, both with each other as well as the GIS positions.

March 3, 2012

Twitter Streaming with EventMachine and DynamoDB

Filed under: Dynamo,EventMachine,MongoDB,Tweets — Patrick Durusau @ 7:28 pm

Twitter Streaming with EventMachine and DynamoDB

From the post:

This week Amazon Web Services launched their latest database offering ‘DynamoDB’ – a highly-scalable NoSQL database service.

We’ve been using a couple of NoSQL database engines at work for a while now: Redis and MongoDB. Mongo allowed us to simplify many of our data models and represent more faithfully the underlying entities we were trying to represent in our applications and Redis is used for those projects where we need to make sure that a person only classifies an object once.1

Whether you’re using MongoDB or MySQL, scaling the performance and size of a database is non-trivial and is a skillset in itself. DynamoDB is a fully managed database service aiming to offer high-performance data storage and retrieval at any scale, regardless of request traffic or storage requirements. Unusually for Amazon Web Services, they’ve made a lot of noise about some of the underlying technologies behind DynamoDB, in particular they’ve utilised SSD hard drives for storage. I guess telling us this is designed to give us a hint at the performance characteristics we might expect from the service.

» A worked example

As with all AWS products there are a number of articles outlining how to get started with DynamoDB. This article is designed to provide an example use case where DynamoDB really shines – parsing a continual stream of data from the Twitter API. We’re going to use the Twitter streaming API to capture tweets and index them by user_id and creation time.

Wanted to include something a little different after all the graph database and modeling questions. 😉

I need to work on something like this to more effectively use Twitter as an information stream. Passing all mentions of graphs and related terms along for further processing, perhaps by a map between Twitter userIDs and known authors. Could be interesting.

August 18, 2011

How You Should Go About Learning NoSQL

Filed under: Dynamo,MongoDB,NoSQL,Redis — Patrick Durusau @ 6:46 pm

How You Should Go About Learning NoSQL

Interesting post that expands on three rules for learning NoSQL:

1: Use MongoDB.
2: Take 20 minute to learn Redis
3: Watch this video to understand Dynamo.

Powered by WordPress