If you treat DynamoDB as a DBMS, you’re going to be disappointed (for the reasons you mention). But if you think of it as a highly-durable immediately-consistent btree in the cloud, it’s amazing. DynamoDB is closer to Redis than MySQL. Amazon does it a disservice by putting it in the databases category.
Its not just that it is put in the database category, but that its champions at AWS make statements like "if you are utilising RDBMS you are living in the past", or that "there are very few use cases to choose Postgres over DynamoDB".
DynamoDb is like redis without the fun data structures, the fantastic cli and discoverability, the usefull configurable tradeoff between fast and consistent, and really much-needed features s.a listing your keys.
Daniel, I'm a big fan of yours but disagree with this take :).
It's definitely a database. The modeling principles are different, and you won't get some of the niceties you get with a RDBMS, but it still allows for flexible querying and more.
S3 and DDB are incredibly similar. Their fundamental operators are the same: key-value get/put and ordered list, and their consistency is roughly the same.
What differentiates DDB and S3 the most is cost and performance.
They're both highly-durable primitive data structures in the cloud, with a few extra features attached.
No, I meant a DBMS. Almost all the things you'd expect in a DBMS are not there. Take a look at most of the comments in this thread. Everyone expecting DBMS things, and complaining that they're not there.
