Transactions and atomicity

DynamoDB supports ACID transactions through dedicated multi-item APIs, providing ACID qualities for these operations. While single-item operations in DynamoDB are inherently ACID, the specific transaction APIs ensure these characteristics for multi-item operations. For those unfamiliar with the term ACID, it represents key properties in database transactions. Refer to (5) to read up more on these.

Note that DynamoDB’s implementation of ACID transactions in a highly distributed system differs from traditional relational databases. Exploring these differences, highlighting key features, and diving into best practices—complementary to the information available on the AWS docs (6), which I highly recommend reviewing—will be our focus. Let us start by examining the primary differences.

Differences from traditional RDBMS transactions

In traditional RDBMS, transactions are typically opened and closed programmatically using specific...