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Amazon DynamoDB vs Datomic Cloud: What are the differences?

Introduction

When considering database services for your application, it's important to understand the key differences between Amazon DynamoDB and Datomic Cloud. Both services offer scalable, reliable, and highly available solutions for different use cases. Here are the key differences between the two services:

  1. Data Model: Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database that uses a key-value and document data model, allowing for flexibility in storing different types of data. On the other hand, Datomic Cloud is a database that uses an entity-attribute-value model, providing a more structured approach to data storage.

  2. Consistency Model: Amazon DynamoDB offers eventual consistency by default, with the option to choose strong consistency if required. In contrast, Datomic Cloud provides strong consistency out of the box, ensuring that all reads reflect the latest writes to the system.

  3. Query Language: Amazon DynamoDB uses a proprietary query language and API for data retrieval and manipulation. Datomic Cloud, on the other hand, utilizes Datalog, a declarative query language that allows for expressive and powerful queries over the database.

  4. Data Storage: Amazon DynamoDB is primarily designed for operational data storage, offering fast and predictable performance for read and write operations. Datomic Cloud, on the other hand, is optimized for transactional data storage, providing a full audit history of changes made to the data over time.

  5. Scaling: Amazon DynamoDB allows for scaling by increasing read and write capacity units to meet the application's demands. Datomic Cloud, on the other hand, offers horizontal scaling by adding additional storage nodes to handle increased workload and storage requirements.

  6. Data Security: Amazon DynamoDB provides encryption at rest and in transit to secure data stored in the database. Datomic Cloud offers fine-grained access control and audit logging to restrict access to sensitive data and track changes made to the database.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Amazon DynamoDB and Datomic Cloud can help in choosing the right database service for your specific application requirements.

Advice on

We are building a social media app, where users will post images, like their post, and make friends based on their interest. We are currently using Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. We are looking for another database like Amazon DynamoDB; how much this decision can be efficient in terms of pricing and overhead?

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Replies (1)
William Frank
Data Science and Engineering at GeistM · | 2 upvotes · 114.7K views
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Hi, Akash,

I wouldn't make this decision without lots more information. Cloud Firestore has a much richer metamodel (document-oriented) than Dynamo (key-value), and Dynamo seems to be particularly restrictive. That is why it is so fast. There are many needs in most applications to get lightning access to the members of a set, one set at a time. Dynamo DB is a great choice. But, social media applications generally need to be able to make long traverses across a graph. While you can make almost any metamodel act like another one, with your own custom layers on top of it, or just by writing a lot more code, it's a long way around to do that with simple key-value sets. It's hard enough to traverse across networks of collections in a document-oriented database. So, if you are moving, I think a graph-oriented database like Amazon Neptune, or, if you might want built-in reasoning, Allegro or Ontotext, would take the least programming, which is where the most cost and bugs can be avoided. Also, managed systems are also less costly in terms of people's time and system errors. It's easier to measure the costs of managed systems, so they are often seen as more costly.

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What are some alternatives to ?
Google Cloud Datastore
Use a managed, NoSQL, schemaless database for storing non-relational data. Cloud Datastore automatically scales as you need it and supports transactions as well as robust, SQL-like queries.
MongoDB
MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.
Amazon SimpleDB
Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest. Behind the scenes, Amazon SimpleDB creates and manages multiple geographically distributed replicas of your data automatically to enable high availability and data durability. Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Your data is automatically indexed, making it easy to quickly find the information that you need. There is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. And scale-out is as simple as creating new domains, rather than building out new servers.
MySQL
The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web