Amazon Goes Back to the Future With ‘NoSQL’ Database
Amazon helped start the “NoSQL” movement. And now it’s giving the cause another shot in the arm.
NoSQL is a widespread effort to build a new kind of database for “unstructured” information — the sort of information that comes spilling off the internet with each passing second. Five years ago, Amazon introduced a NoSQL database service called SimpleDB, and now, it’s offering what you might think of as Amazon NoSQL Mark II. It’s called DynamoDB.
Like SimpleDB, DynamoDB is one of many Amazon Web Services (AWS), a set of tools offering online access to various computing resources, from virtual servers to virtual storage to databases and other software. “Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we’ve learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS,” Werner Vogels, the Amazon Web Services CTO, said in a blog post. “[It] is designed to maintain predictably high performance and to be highly cost efficient for workloads of any scale, from the smallest to the largest internet-scale applications.”
