Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a powerful expansive cloud infrastructure platform for building modern web applications.

AWS provides services for data, presentation, authentication, security, video encoding, and much more. Offering over 175 fully-featured services from data centers globally, AWS powers a large percentage of the internet.

This collection includes introductory level material for AWS DynamoDB. We cover what DynamoDB is, when you'd use it, and the vocabulary you'll need to understand documentation and talks in the ecosystem.

You'll come out of this playlist with the ability to understand what people mean when they say DynamoDB and the base you need to get started yourself.

**View and contribute to the [Community Notes!](https://github.com/eggheadio-projects/intro-to-dynamodb)**

DynamoDB is a serverless-compatible database that AWS hosts and manages *for* you. It includes many of the features you'd expect from a database like backup and restore, transactions, an array of clients (GUI and CLI)

* [awesome-dynamodb](https://github.com/alexdebrie/awesome-dynamodb)
* Rick Houlihan's [AWS re:Invent 2019: Advanced Design Patterns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqfmXiZTlM)

WTF is DynamoDB?

DynamoDB's concept of tables roughly maps to the idea of a table or collection you might be used to from other systems. We cover what Attributes are and why they matter, as well as introducing Items, DynamoDB types, and some useful console functionality in the browser.

Overview of DynamoDB Tables, Items, Attributes, and types in the AWS console

We explore primary keys in DynamoDB and their relation to partition keys and sort keys using the AWS console to insert items. Sort keys and uniqueness are used to introduce the concept of creating relationships between items which is what will enable us to build out single table designs in the advanced data modeling videos.

Primary keys vs partition keys and building relationships with sort keys in DynamoDB

Global Secondary Indexes, or GSIs, are a great way to enable a variety of access patterns that a regular key/value document store might not be able to handle. GSIs allow us to create sparse indexes and choose what data is projected into our indexes. Using GSIs effectively is critical to building up single table designs.

An Introduction to DynamoDB Global Secondary Indexes (GSIs)

DynamoDB's cost model is built on Read and Write Capacity Units. It's likely that you'll start out in the free tier and it's still good to start building up an understanding of how what you do in DynamoDB will affect how much you pay.

*Don't Worry* too much. The amounts we're talking about here are dollars for up to a million units.

* $1.25 per million write request units
* $0.25 per million read request units

WTF are read capacity units (RCU) and write capacity units (WCU) in DynamoDB (Cost $$)

In DynamoDB, it's possible to "age-out" or delete items based on a time-to-live attribute. We cover how to set up such an attribute, what values you need to use, and how they can be used for both deletion of items as well as for aging older data out of dynamo into another table or even S3.

Expiring and Archiving Items with Time To Live (TTL) Attributes in DynamoDB

DynamoDB offers low level API access, a mid-level DocumentClient, and High level Object Persistence clients for Java and .net. The mid-level client is more widely supported than the language-level integration the object persistence clients use.

Intro to DynamoDB

Chris Biscardi

Course Content