Amazon DynamoDB Pros and Cons

Up-front pricing offered by DynamnoDB (as with all AWS services) is great given that some of the competitors out there have very nebulous pricing plans. Automated scaling and replication is great, so you're saving the cost of (probably) a full-time DBA person. Storage is fast too: SSDs are very superior to having your own SATA drives running Mongo or the like. The low learning curve (of querying the DB) is great as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Multiple indicies is something that it lacks. This results in DynamoDB being great for key lookups, but really bad for multiple predicate queries. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I was interested in using DynamoDB so I wouldn't have to create an maintain a MongoDB cluster. The high availability is nice and seems to be quite easy to scale up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not enough tools to support usage. MongoDB has many very mature ORMs and great community support. Development with DynamoDB was incredibly slow and difficult.

Learning how to use DynamoDB is difficult because of the unfriendliness of the AWS documentation. The documentation are very vague, in a generic layout clearly not fit for it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the autoscaling and extensive feature set. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dislike the steep learning curve and lack of proper documentation for complex operations with the SDKs. For example the updateExpression key is Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You can decide and change in the future what throughput do you need.

This is a special important if you don't know how many user you will have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Scan and search could be faster - if you have a lot of data this is expensive and time consuming operation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For me, the best part of DynamoDB is the price and the fact that it is stored on SSDs. It's hard to find a better deal than that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The API, at least when I was using it, for Node was pretty horrible. Not sure if it has been updated since. But it is unlike any other database I have used, in a negative way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

DynamoDB is very easy to setup and use. Even the free-tier provides enough functionality for a small to medium-sized web-application. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only thing I did not like so far is that secondary indices always require to upgrade to the payed-tier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The indexing mechanism solves almost every case of data usages.

Local indexes defines the key of the documents and global indexes help you model your documents differently Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- The admin is uncomfortable to work with

- Aggregation functions are missing Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

schemaless design. You can add a field anytime easily. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are only hash key and range key in DynamoDB. Sometimes it's hard to search a record using a filter that is not hash key or range key. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best part about Dynamodb is the managed infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Occasional outages and the historically poor documentation. This has improved in recent months but took an extended period of time to accomplish. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No database scaling to worry about, no database server to deploy - just an API. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing yet, been using it for around 2 months. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.