Friday, January 20, 2012

Schema Example on Amazon DynamoDB

First an apology to anyone who read my previous blog post. I had used wrong rates for throughput capacity. I noticed this since my calculations seemed a little costly :)

Throughput Capacity price as on AWS website, as of today:

* Write Throughput: $0.01 per hour for every 10 units of Write Capacity
* Read Throughput: $0.01 per hour for every 50 units of Read Capacity

Thus as per my example of 7 tables with minimum 5 Read and 5 Write throughput capacity per table, hourly pricing is:
35 * $0.001 = $0.035 (Write)
35 * $0.0002 = $0.007 (Read)
Total hourly cost = $0.042, monthly cost = $30.24

My current database design is using 3 tables. One is for authentication. We will allow users to signup/login using either email+password (MD5) or using FB Connect or similar. In both cases we will store these authentication string(s) in an "Auth" table. The Primary Key will be the auth strings themselves, either concat of email+password or OAuth tokens. The items will have another attribute which will be `UserName`.  I am yet to read FB Connect documentation, so this may need slight re-configuration.

The `UserName` is a PK in the second table which is "User". The items contain common user attributes like `FirstName`, `LastName`, `Email` and many such needed data. The last table is the "Campaign" table where we store campaign configure information for Mag. This has a Hash and Range type Primary Key. The Hash part is the `UserName`, and the Range is the `CampaignId` (unique string generated from the title of the Campaign). Each user can run multiple Campaigns. What I am not sure of is what is the performance hit if all users mostly have only 1 campaign. In that case I think it will be better to store Campaigns as a Set in the "User" table and the "Campaign" table could have just a simple Hash PK named `CampaignId`.

My doubts as of now are what values to set for throughput. I neither want to overcharge myself, nor do I want AWS to throttle the connection. I guess a real example will shine more light. Back to coding now!

4 comments:

Jeremeamia said...

You do get 10 reads/sec and 5 writes/sec free in the free tier if that applies to you. The AWS-provided SDKs also handle the throttling gracefully, in case that happens. I'm curious to see how it goes for you

Anonymous said...

What do you mean by
"unique string generated from the title of the Campaign"? Why not simply use the campaign title if it is has to be unique by itself

brainless said...

What I meant was that if the Campaign title is itself not unique then add some extra unique characters.
Now having Campaign title in URL helps in SEO. And testing for uniqueness consumes CPU cycles, so just add a PHP uniqid to the title and make it unique always.

Anonymous said...

good post ..

For 7 table example , Total hourly cost = $0.042, monthly cost = $30.24

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