Using DynamoDB in 2025 is such a weird proposition. Horrible dev ...

We used it extensively on the second project I mentioned and a couple of other projects for caching / rate limiting and distributed locking needs. Never enabled the persistence layer (which I believe is pretty durable). So we only treated as an ephemeral data store, lowering the architectural complexity of things significantly. Otherwise you need to think about backups, testing backups, clustering in case of scaling needs, I have no idea how persistence works with clustering... DynamoDB is fully managed and solid. mejutoco 9 months ago ... My items are not relations, and I don't see the point in transforming them to and from relational form. And if I did, each row would have like 5 columns set to NULL, in addition to a catch-all string 'data' column where I put the actual stuff I really need. Which is how you slow down an SQL database. So RDBMS is no good for me, and I'm no good for RDBMS. RDBMS offers strong single-node consistency guarantees (which people leave off by default by using an isolation level of 'almost'!). But even without microservices, there are too many nodes: the DB, the backend, external partner integrations, the frontend, the customer's brain. You can't do if-this-then-that from the frontend, since 'this' will no longer be true when 'that' happens. So even if I happen to have a fully-ACID DB, I still lean into events & eventual consistency to manage state across the various nodes. … The thing that would put me off using DynamoDB is the same reason I wouldn't use any other tech - can I download it? For this reason I'd probably reach for Cassandra first. That said I haven't looked at the landscape in a while and there might be much better tools. But it also wouldn't matter what I want to use instead of DynamoDB, because the DevOps team of wherever I work will just choose whatever's native&managed by their chosen cloud provider. … You can manage up to 0 partners easily. Once you go above that threshold, you're into "2-Generals" territory. At that point you're either inconsistent, eventually-consistent, or you're just bypassing your own database and using theirs directly. > dev and user experience are going to be much simpler and easier. … no-SQL initially (for *much better* dev experience) && no-SQL later (for scaling) > When your objects are inconsistently shaped something has to fix them They have one schema (the class file) instead of two (the class file and the SQL migrations). But what happens when that schema defining class file needs to change? You put all your migration code there? How is that different from SQL migrations? … It is my favourite database though (next to S3)! For cases where my queries are pretty much known upfront, and I want predictable great performance. As Marc Brooker wrote in [1], "DynamoDB’s Best Feature: Predictability". I consistently get single digit millisecond GETs, 10-15ms PUTs, and a few more milliseconds for TransactWriteItems. Are you able to complex joins? No. Are you able to do queries based on different hash/sort keys easily? Not without adding GSIs or a new table. The issue in the past few years was the whole craze around "single-table design". Folks took it literally as having to shove all their data in a single table, instead of understanding the reason and the cases that worked well. And with ongoing improvements of DynamoDB those cases were getting fewer and fewer over time.