Episode #44: Data Modeling Strategies from The DynamoDB Book with Alex DeBrie

About Alex DeBrie:Alex is a trainer and consultant focused on helping people using cutting-edge, cloud-native technologies. He specializes in serverless technologies on AWS, including DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, and more. He’s an AWS Data Hero and recently published author of The DynamoDB Book and the creator of DynamoDBGuide.com. He previously worked at Serverless, Inc., where he held a variety of roles during his tenure, helped build out a developer community, and architected and built their first commercial product.Twitter: @alexbdebrieBlog: https://www.alexdebrie.com/DynamoDB Book: www.dynamodbbook.com (Discount Code: SERVERLESSCHATS)DynamoDB Guide: www.dynamodbguide.comWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GZTLFWlEnawTranscript:Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Alex DeBrie. Hey, Alex, thanks for joining me.Alex: Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.Jeremy: So you are actually returning to Serverless Chats. You were my first guest, and you are also my first returning guest. So I don't know if that's an honor, but thank you very much for being here.Alex: Yeah, it was an honor to be here the first time and honored to be back as well.Jeremy: So a lot has changed since you were with me almost a year ago. You went out, you used to be working at Serverless, Inc., where they created the Serverless Framework. You went out you started doing some consulting, you were named an AWS Data Hero. So why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what you've been doing over these last few months?Alex: Yep, sure. So as you mentioned, I used to work for Serverless Inc, creators of the Serverless Framework. That's how you and I got hooked up initially. Worked for them for about two and a half years. And then last fall I was named a AWS Data hHero specifically focusing on DynamoDB which was a big honor for me. And then in January I left Serverless Inc to go on my own to do a few different things, some consulting, some teaching and also finished up this book I've been working on.Jeremy: Yeah and so speaking about this book, I'm super excited about this because I remember we were out I think in Seattle at one point several months ago and I looked over your shoulder, I saw you typing and I asked, "What are you doing?" You're like, "Oh, I'm writing a book on DynamoDB, of course."And you obviously you created the DynamoDB guide at dynamodbguide.com which is a really great resource for anybody looking to get familiar with DynamoDB. It's much more approachable I think, than the documentation on AWS. It's really well written and there were a couple of modeling strategies in there and things like that but this new book, which I've had a chance to read which is awesome, by the way, so congratulations really, really well done. But this new book, just you know it is not DynamoDB guide repackaged.This is a whole new thing with tons of strategies, tons of information. So why don't you tell us a little bit about this book?Alex: Yeah, sure thing. So as you mentioned, I created dynamodbguide.com. That was about two and a half years ago now. And it was basically, I'd watch Rick Houlihans re:Invent talk over Christmas one year, and just had my mind blown and rewatched it so many times, and scribbling it out in Notepad on how it all worked, and then wanted to share what I learned. So I made this site DynamoDBguide.com.That did pretty well. And I've stayed in touch with the DynamoDB team since then. But I really wanted to go further than that. Because I think like you're saying there are some missing stuff out there. So I've been working for the last almost about a year on this book.I started I think, last June or July. And really, we just want to go deep on DynamoDB and not just the basics, all that stuff really introduce this idea of strategies, introduced some data modeling examples to show that you can really handle some complex access patterns. It's not just about key value storage, you can do complex relational data in DynamoDB.Jeremy: Yeah, definitely. And so just in case somebody doesn't know what DynamoDB is, let's just give them a quick overview of what exactly that is.Alex: Yep, sure. So DynamoDB is a NoSQL database offered by Amazon AWS. It's a fully managed database. I'd say, it got started where amazon.com their scaling needs just you know, they were out scaling their relational databases. So they built this underlying storage mechanism that... they built this underlying database to replace their relational databases. That was used internally at Amazon. They released some of the principles behind it in this DynamoDB or this Dynamo paper.That eventually became a service in AWS called DynamoDB. Fully managed service, works really well for highly scalable applications. In fact, all the tier one services at Amazon and AWS are required to use it. So if you think about the shopping cart or the inventory system or IAM or EC2, all that stuff that's all using DynamoDB under the hood. But also it's gotten really popular in the serverless ecosystem just because the connection model, the permissions model, the provisioning model, the billing model, it all works really well with everything we like about serverless compute.So a lot of people have been using it there. And that's how I got introduced to it mostly and just wanted to go deeper on it and really use it correctly.Jeremy: Yeah, right. And so one thing that's super important to remember is DynamoDB is NoSQL, right? Or NoSQL, it is not like your traditional RDBMS system. There's no joins, right? You're not doing any of that sort of stuff. And there's reasons for it, obviously, it's a speed thing, and I did a whole episode or actually I did two episodes with Rick Houlihan himself and he went through a bunch of those things. So if you want to really learn or get a good audio overview, I guess, of DynamoDB I suggest go back, listen to those episodes because I want to use your time today to actually go through a couple of things in the book that I found to be just really helpful, like things that I don't think they pop out to you when you read the documentation.And I've talked to so many people, because I love DynamoDB. I have my DynamoDB toolbox. I'm working on a new version of it right now that I'm thinking like, it's just going to make my life easier. Hopefully, it makes other people's lives easier. But I just use it so much. And the problem always is, is I think a lot of people think that it's just a key value store, right?And it is to a certain extent, but there are ways to model data that are just, I mean, they're fascinating. It's absolutely amazing what you can do with some of these things. So, I'd love to point these things out. Because I think like I said, these are things that will not jump off the page at you when it comes to documentation. So the first thing that I think you did a really good job explaining was the importance of item collections. And this is something for me where I always think about them as folders with files in the folders and try to think about it that way. But you probably do a better job explaining it.<...