Podcast

Ep 23 – DynamoDB: A tier 0 database

August 10, 2021

This week’s guest

Rick Houlihan

Senior Practice Manager AWS

Regular listeners know that I’m a CS girl at heart. So when I heard about a mind-blowing lecture about NoSQL and DynamoDB, I said to myself – we gotta have it on the podcast!

Today’s guest, Rick Houlihan, is a senior practice manager at AWS. It’s not surprising that he gathers groupies for his talks. He’s the inventor of Single Table Design. Rick and I both believe it’s time for telcos to start using tier 0, NoSQL databases like DynamoDB for hardcore applications – which is why we used it to build the Totogi charging engine. Listen to the episode to learn more!

Click the play button to hear our conversation about:

The evolution of database technology [3:44];
When it’s the right time to use NoSQL [6:18];
Where and why SQL servers start to break [6:57];
The power of just-in-time capacity provisioning every day, all day [12:10]; and
Why telcos shouldn’t be in the business of running infrastructure [13:05].

Links and Resources

You can find the transcript for this episode here.
Watch Rick’s talk from AWS Re:Invent 2019: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns and download the related slide deck. (If you’re short on time, go straight to 6:10 – 17:00.)
Follow Rick on Twitter and don’t miss his tweet about his “mind-blowing” lecture on NoSQL and DynamoDB.
We use DynamoDB for the Totogi Charging Engine, which allows us to deliver unheard of TPS and cost savings. Learn more on the Totogi website.
Read this article by Alex Debrie about how DynamoDB scales.
Since we’re talking about history, watch this clip of Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake’s history of rap from Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary show.

Author’s bio

Rick Houlihan runs the NoSQL Blackbelt team at AWS, and is responsible for consulting with the largest and most strategic customers the business supports. He routinely provides guidance on industry best practices, distributed systems implementation, cloud migration, and more. He led the architecture and design effort at Amazon for migrating thousands of relational workloads from Oracle to NoSQL and built the center of excellence team responsible for defining the best practices and design patterns used by thousands of Amazon internal service teams and AWS customers today. He is the principal technologist on the DynamoDB service team, focused on building the market for our NoSQL services through design consultations, content creation, evangelism, and training.

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