Questioning his belief in relational database dogma, new submitter
Travis Brown happened to evaluate Amazon's Dynamo DB and
MonogDB. His situation was the
opposite of Jeff Cogswell's: he started
off wanting to prefer Dynamo DB, but came to the conclusion that the
benefits of Amazon managing the database for him didn't outweigh the
features Mongo offers. From the article:
"DynamoDB technically isn't a database, it's a database service.
Amazon is responsible for the availability, durability, performance,
configuration, optimization and all other manner of minutia that I
didn't want occupying my mind. I've never been a big fan of managing
the day-to-day operations of a database, so I liked the idea of taking
that task off my plate. ... DynamoDB only allows you to query against the primary key, or the primary key and range. There are ways to periodically index your
data using a separate service like CloudSearch, but we are quickly
losing the initial simplicity of it being a database
service. ... However, it turns out MongoDB isn't quite as difficult as
the nerds had me believe, at least not at our scale. MongoDB works as
advertised and auto-shards and provides a very simple way to get up
and running with replica sets."
His
weblog entry has a few code snippets illustrating how he came to his
conclusions.