By Charles Babcock InformationWeek, January 18, 2012
Amazon Web Services added a beta service,
DynamoDB, to its cloud service offerings as a way to bring a big-data, NoSQL system to its customers.
"You can dial up database capacity without thinking about it," said Werner Vogels, CTO of AWS, in a 9 a.m. webcast today. "It's not database software. It's a database service," one that can perform "consistently fast," he said.
Anyone creating an account for the service can establish a database table with the data stored on solid-state disks (SSDs). That gives the service a high degree of performance predictability by eliminating calls to rotating disks. "Customers can typically achieve average service-side in the single-digit milliseconds," Vogels wrote in an early morning post to his All Things Distributed blog.
DynamoDB will give customers the ability to make a performance-vs.-consistency tradeoff. Customers automatically will get high performance with "eventual" consistency, or relational database type of assurance of the same answer to the same question all the time. Eventual consistency is often used in situations in which the precision of the answer is less important than the speed of response. For instance, a game player, asking how many fellow players are available, might be satisfied by with an answer that is off by a few players, even if a precise answer were available several seconds later.
DynamoDB is added to Amazon's SimpleDB database service and its Relational Database Service. It has been integrated with another existing service, Elastic Map Reduce, AWS's implementation of the Hadoop big data distribution and sorting system.
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