The database technology world has evolved tremendously over the last decade. In the recent few years, there has been a huge data explosion that is driven primarily by data mining businesses and data generated by the proliferation of mobile and social applications. While the volumes have increased beyond anyone's imagination, the way we access the information of this data and the expected user experience has also changed phenomenally. For instance, when you search for information, you subconsciously use natural language text and expect to see what you were looking for on the first page, all within the blink of an eye. Also, you want this experience on a mobile device as well, even when not connected to your home and office network. So, modern applications can no longer use the traditional relational database to achieve the scale and speed that these applications demand. Welcome to the world of NoSQL!

While there are several open source NoSQL solutions available, such as Cassandra and MongoDB, in this book, Tanmay Deshpande introduces Amazon AWS DynamoDB, which is currently in development. DynamoDB is an excellent implementation of NoSQL available as a cloud service. This book should be a must have in a cloud programmer's toolkit, especially for those seeking to scale up their existing mobile cloud applications on the AWS cloud platform.

So what does a programmer expect out of a technical book? I'll draw an analogy using cookbooks. You see most cookbooks with beautiful and enticing recipe pictures; however, when you try the recipes, even if you are able to complete the book, the outcome will be totally different. The recipes are not customized to the reader's level of ability and local accessibility to the ingredients and kitchen appliances. There are technical and programming books too that suffer similarly. Not only should a programming book be easy to read and follow, the programmer should also be able to meet his real-life product development requirements.

I know the author well, and most importantly, he is a programmer by trade. This is his second book on the topic of Big Data. He has learned from readers' feedback from his previous book. I believe this book has all the coding samples that are tried and tested before they were included in the book. This book endeavors to guide the programmer through practical step-by-step processes that a software programmer would go through to speed up NoSQL integration.

I can't wait to try out DynamoDB myself, and I am sure you will find this book useful to transition from relational to NoSQL database.

Constancio Fernandes

Sr. Director Development, Data Center Security, Symantec