An Overview of Low-level, Mid-level (Document), and High-level DynamoDB Clients

Instructor: [0:00] DynamoDB has a number of clients and a number of languages. Depending on which language you're using, you'll either get access to the low-level interface, the document interface, or the high-level interface. These can roughly be thought of as a spectrum from low to high with document being in the middle.

[0:14] The object persistence interface, which is the highest-level interface, is only available for Java and .NET. This integrates DynamoDB with native Java types. What this allows you to do is interact with just these classes instead of interacting with DynamoDB itself.

[0:29] The document interfaces are more widespread, but the official interface is being java.net, no JS and browser site JavaScript.

[0:36] The document-level interfaces allow you to take advantage of your programming languages of choices, obstructions around objects, and other types, but also requires you to use explicit GET, PUT, DELETE, or UPDATE mechanisms to interact with DynamoDB itself.

[0:51] The low-level interface requires you to do a lot more work and doesn't do translation from your programming language of choice into DynamoDB types.

[0:59] In this Java example, you can see that we're doing a PUT on an artist with an attribute value that is a string and then we pass the string in. If we were using a document level client, we wouldn't have to specify that this was a string, we could just pass the string in and the client would translate it for us when we're talking to DynamoDB.