Moving from a Relational Mindset

We hope that the previous chapter, Simple Key-Value, helped you understand a bit about the NoSQL world and particularly how DynamoDB is good at what it was built for – consistent performance at scale. We will build on the same in this chapter, where I’ll attempt to connect DynamoDB data modeling with related aspects from the relational database management systems (RDBMS) world. Although these aspects would be related, they may not necessarily be similar as some of the concepts are more likely the opposite of those in the RDBMS paradigm. For example, we have touched upon the fact that normalization of data with primary and foreign keys is important across relational databases to optimize storage and that is the industry norm, but, with NoSQL, denormalization is strongly encouraged and can very well be the only way to optimize compute as well as support horizontal scaling and the goodness that comes with it.

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