Book Image

Seven NoSQL Databases in a Week

By : Sudarshan Kadambi, Xun (Brian) Wu
Book Image

Seven NoSQL Databases in a Week

By: Sudarshan Kadambi, Xun (Brian) Wu

Overview of this book

This is the golden age of open source NoSQL databases. With enterprises having to work with large amounts of unstructured data and moving away from expensive monolithic architecture, the adoption of NoSQL databases is rapidly increasing. Being familiar with the popular NoSQL databases and knowing how to use them is a must for budding DBAs and developers. This book introduces you to the different types of NoSQL databases and gets you started with seven of the most popular NoSQL databases used by enterprises today. We start off with a brief overview of what NoSQL databases are, followed by an explanation of why and when to use them. The book then covers the seven most popular databases in each of these categories: MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Redis, HBase, Cassandra, In?uxDB, and Neo4j. The book doesn't go into too much detail about each database but teaches you enough to get started with them. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of the different NoSQL databases and their functionalities, empowering you to select and use the right database according to your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

DynamoDB data types and terminology


In DynamoDB tables, items and attributes are the core component that you work with. A table is a collection of items, and each item is a collection of attributes. DynamoDB uses the primary key to uniquely identify each item in the table and secondary indexes to fire the query more flexibly. DynamoDB also provides streams to capture data modification events in DynamoDB tables. DynamoDB has size limits on the following components—this may vary from region to region:

  • Tables, items, and attributes
  • Primary key
  • Secondary indexes
  • DynamoDB streams

In the next section, we will look at these components in detail.

Tables, items, and attributes

Similar to other database systems, DynamoDB stores data in tables. A table is a collection of data. For example, if we have a table called Person, you could use this to store personal information, contact information, information about friends and family, and other such information. You could also have a table called Cars to store...