Simple Search capabilities with NoSql (DynamoDB) - amazon-web-services

I am new to NoSQL. I am trying to make simple app which will have products that you search through. With SQL I would simply have a products table and be able to search any of the columns for substrings with %LIKE% and pull the returned rows. I would like to use DynamoDB, but seemingly there is no way of doing this without introducing AWS OpenSearch (ElasticSearch) which will probably cost more than all my DynamoDb tables. Is there any simple way to do this in DynamoDb without having to scan the whole table and filtering with contains?

No, there is no way to do what you want (search dynamodb) without adding in another layer such as elasticsearch - keep it simple, use a traditional database.
IMO, never assume you need a nosql database - because you rarely do - always assume you need a traditional database until proven otherwise.

Ok so DynamoDB is not what you are looking for, it is designed for a very different use case.
However, ElasticSearch which is in no way tied to DynamoDB very much is what you are looking for and will greatly simplify what you are trying to over using a traditional SQL database. Those who are saying otherwise, are providing poor information. A traditional database cannot index a %LIKE% query, where this is precisely what ElasticSearch does on every field in your document.
Getting started with ElasticSearch is super easy. Just download the Jar and run it, then start going through examples posting and getting documents from the index. If your experience is anything like mine, you will never really want to use a SQL database again, but as is mentioned they each have their own place, and so I do still use traditional RDBMS but I specialize in ElasticSearch.
I have converted many applications that were unable to find reasonable performance, to ElasticSearch where the performance is almost always sub second, and typically a fraction of that. An RDBMS being asked to do many %LIKE% matches will not be able to provide you sub second results.
There are also a number of tools that will automatically funnel data from your RDBMS db into ElasticSearch so that you can have the benefits of both worlds.
NoSQL means a great many things. In general it has been applied to at several classes of datastore.
Columnar Datastore - DynamoDB, Hive
Document/Object Database - MongoDB, CouchDB, MarkLogic, and a great many others
Key/Value - Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, Memcache
Search Index - SOLR, ElasticSearch, MarkLogic
ElasticSearch bridges the gap between Document Database and Search Index, providing the features of both. It also provides the capabilities of a Key/Value data store.
The columnar datastore is much more tuned for doing work across massive amounts of data, generally in an aggregate, but results from the queries are not the kind of performance you are looking for. These are used for datasets with trillions of rows and hundreds of features/columns.
ElasticSearch however provides very rapid search across large numbers of JSON documents index by default every value in the json.
The way to do this with dynamodb is by using ElasticSearch, however, you do not need DynamoDB to do this with ElasticSearch, so you don't need double the cost.

Related

Cloud SQL to BigQuery ETL tool

I have a Cloud SQL instance with hundreds of databases, one for each customer. Each database has the same tables in it, but data only for the specific customer.
What I want to do with it, is transform in various ways so to get an overview table with all of the customers. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find a tool that can iterate over all the databases a Cloud SQL instance has, execute queries and then write that data to BigQuery.
I was really hoping that Dataflow would be the solution but as far as I have tried and looked online, I cannot find a way to make it work. Since I spent a lot of time already on investigating Dataflow, I thought it might be best to ask here.
Currently I am looking at Data Fusion, Datastream, Apache Airflow.
Any suggestions?
Why Dataflow doesn't fit your needs? You could run a query to find out the tables, and then iteratively build the Pipeline/JdbcIO sources/PCollections based on those results.
Beam has a Flatten transform that can join PCollections.
What you are trying to do is one of the use cases why Dataflow Flex Templates was created (to have dynamic DAG creation within Dataflow itself) but that can be pulled without Flex Templates as well.
Airflow can be used for this sort of thing (essentially, you're doing the same task over and over, so with an appropriate operator and a for-loop you can certainly generate a DAG with hundreds of near-identical tasks that export each of your databases).
However, I'd be remiss not to ask: should you?
There may be a really excellent reason why you've created hundreds of databases in one instance, rather than one database with a customer field on each table. Yet if security is paramount, a row level security policy could add an additional element of safety without putting you in this difficult situation. Adding an index over the customer field would allow you to retrieve the appropriate sub-table swiftly (in return for a small speed cost when inserting new rows) so performance also doesn't seem like a reason to do this.
Given that it would then be pretty straightforward to get your data into BigQuery I would be moving heaven and earth to switch over to this setup, if I were you!

Is dynamodb suitable for growing or pivotable product?

Amazon said
NoSQL design requires a different mindset than RDBMS design. For an RDBMS, you can create a normalized data model without thinking about access patterns. You can then extend it later when new questions and query requirements arise. For DynamoDB, by contrast, you shouldn't start designing your schema until you know the questions it needs to answer. Understanding the business problems and the application use cases up front is absolutely essential.
It seems that I should design the tables after designing the product for efficient query cost.
But a product can be pivoted or be appended new features. In early stage, nobody knows where the product goes.
Is dynamodb suitable for growing or pivotable product?
In my opinion, the main benefit of Dynamo DB over other NoSQL solutions is that it is a managed database service. You pay for reads and writes and you never worry about scaling to handle larger data, more users. If you are doing a prototype or don't have technical know-how to setup a database server and host in the cloud it could be useful and cost effective. It has its limitations however so if you do have technical resources consider another open source NoSQL option.
I think that statement by Amazon is confusing and is probably more marketing than anything else. Use NoSQL in cases where your data is only accessed in distinct elements that do no have to be combined in a complex manner. It's also helpful if you don't have an exact schema defined because NoSQL doesn't require a hard set schema you can store any fields in a table and you can always add new fields. This is helpful when things are changing rapidly and you don't want to migrate everything as strictly as an RDBMS would require. If however you're going to have to run complex logic or calculations combining data from across tables you should use an RDBMS. You could use NoSQL for some data and and RDBMS for other data in a hybrid fashion but in that case you probably wouldn't want to use Dynamo DB because you'd want full ownership to set it up properly. Hope this helps I'm sure others have more to say and I welcome comments to help me refine my answer.

AWS Redshift vs Snowflake use cases

I was wondering if anyone has used both AWS Redshift and Snowflake and use cases where one is better . I have used Redshift but recently someone suggested Snowflake as a good alternative . My use case is basically retail marketing data that will be used by handful of analysts who are not terribly SQL savvy and will most likely have reporting tool on top
Redshift is a good product, but it is hard to think of a use case where it is better than Snowflake. Here are some reasons why Snowflake is better:
The admin console is brilliant, Redshift has none.
Scale-up/down happens in seconds to minutes, Redshift takes minutes to hours.
The documentation for both products is good, but Snowflake is better laid
out and more accessible.
You need to know less "secret sauce" to make Snowflake work well. On Redshift you need to know and understand the performance impacts of things like distribution keys and sort keys, at a minimum.
The load processes for Snowflake are more elegant than Redshift. Redshift assumes that your data is in S3 already. Snowflake supports S3, but has extensions to JDBC, ODBC and dbAPI that really simplify and secure the ingestion process.
Snowflake has great support for in-database JSON, and is rapidly enhancing its XML. Redshift has a more complex approach to JSON, and recommends against it for all but smaller use cases, and does not support XML.
I can only think of two cases which Redshift wins hands-down. One is geographic availability, as Redshift is available in far more locations than Snowflake, which can make a difference in data transfer and statement submission times. The other is the ability to submit a batch of multiple statements. Snowflake can only accept one statement at a time, and that can slow down your batches if they comprise many statements, especially if you are on another continent to your server.
At Ajilius our developers use Redshift, Snowflake and Azure SQL Data Warehouse on a daily basis; and we have customers on all three platforms. Even with that choice, every developer prefers Snowflake as their go-to cloud DW.
I evaluated both Redshift(Redshfit spectrum with S3) and SnowFlake.
In my poc, snowFlake is way way better than Redshift. SnowFlake integrates well with Relational/NOSQL data. No upfront index or partition key required. It works amazing without worrying about what way to access the day.
Redshift is very limited and no json support. Its hard to understand the partition. You have to do lot of work to get something done. No json support. You can use redshift specturm as a bandaid to access S3. Good luck with partioning upfront. Once you created partition in S3 bucket, you are done with that and no way to change until unless you redo process all data again to new structue. You will end up sending time to fix these issues instead of working on fixing real business problems.
Its like comparing Smartphone vs Morse code mechine. Redshift is like morse code kind of implementation and its not for mordern development
We recently switched from Redshift to Snowflake for the following reasons:
Real-time data syncing
Handling of concurrent queries
Minimizing of database administration
Providing different amounts of computing power to different Looker users
A more in-depth writeup can be found on our data blog.
I evaluated Redshift and Snowflake, and a little bit of Athena and Spectrum as well. The latter two were non-starters in cases where we had big joins, as they would run out of memory. For Redshift, I could actually get a better price to performance ratio for a couple reasons:
allows me to choose a distribution key which is huge for co-located joins
allows for extreme discounts on three year reserved pricing, so much so that you can really upsize your compute at a reasonable cost
I could get better performance in most cases with Redshift, but it requires good MPP knowledge to setup the physical schema properly. The cost of expertise and complexity offsets some of the product cost.
Redshift stores JSON in a VARCHAR column. That can cause problems (OOM) when querying a subset of JSON elements across large tables, where the VARCHAR column is sized too big. In our case we had to define the VARCHAR as extremely large to accommodate a few records that had very large JSON documents.
Snowflake functionality is amazing, including:
ability to clone objects
deep functionality in handling JSON data
snowpipe for low maintenance loading, auto scaling loads, trickle updates
streams & tasks for home grown ETL
ability to scale storage and compute separately
ability to scale compute within a minute, requiring no data migration
and many more
One thing that I would caution about Snowflake is that one might be tempted to hire less skilled developers/DBAs to run the system. Performance in a bad schema design can be worked around using a huge compute cluster, but that may not be the best bang for the buck. Regardless, the functionality in Snowflake is amazing.

What is the different between AWS Elasticsearch and AWS Redshift

I read the document that both for data analysis and in cluster structure but I don't understand what use case different.
Amazon Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and clickstream analytics.Amazon Elasticsearch
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale to a petabyte or more. Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse product, while Amazon Elasticsearch is a hosted ElasticSearch cluster.
Redshift is based on PostgreSQL and (afaik) mostly used for BI purpuses and other compute-intensive jobs, the Amazon Elasticsearch is an out-of-the-box ElasticSearch managed cluster (which you cannot use to run SQL queries, since ES is a NoSQL database).
Both Amazon Redshift and Amazon ES are managed services, which means you don't need to do anything in order to manage your servers (this is what you pay for). Using the AWS Console you can add new cluster and you don't need to run any commands on order to install any software - you just need to choose which server to run your cluster on (number of nodes, disk, ram, etc).
If you are not familiar with ElasticSearch you should check their website.
Edit: It is now possible to write SQL queries on ElasticSearch: SQL Support for AWS ElasticSearch
I agree with #IMSoP's assertions above...
To compare the two is like comparing an elephant and a tiger - you're not really asking the right question quite yet.
What you should really be asking is - what are my requirements for my use cases to best fulfill my stakeholder / customer needs, first, and then which data storage technology best aligns with my requirements second...
To be clear - Whether speaking of AWS ElasticSearch Service, or FOSS / Enterprise ElasticSearch (which have signifficant differences, between, even) - ElasticSearch is NOT a Relational Database (RDBMS), nor is it quite a NoSQL (Document Store) Database, either...
ElasticSearch is a Search Engine / Index. It does some things very well, for very specific use cases, however unlike RDBMS data models most signifficantly, ElasticSearch or NoSQL are not going to provide you with FULL ACID Compliance, or Transactional Statement Processing, so if your use case prioritizes data integrity, constrainability, reliability, audit ability, regulatory compliance, recover ability (to Point in Time, even), and normalization of data model for performance and least repetition of data while providing deep cardinality and enforcing model constraints for optimal integrity, "NoSQL and Elastic are not the Droids you're looking for..." and you should be implementing a RDBMS solution. As already mentioned, the AWS Redshift Service is based on PostgreSQL - which is one of the most popular OpenSource RDBMS flavors out there, just offered by AWS as a fully managed solution / service for their customers.
Elastic falls between RDBMS and NoSQL categories, as it is a Search Engine / Index that works most optimally with "single index" type use cases, where A LOT of content is indexed all at once and those documents aren't updated very frequently after the initial bulk indexing,but perhaps the most important thing I could stress is that in my experience it typically does not scale very cost effectively (even managed cluster services) if you want your clusters to perform well, not degrade over time, retain large historical datasets, and remain highly available for your consumers - and for most will likely become cost PROHIBITIVE VERY fast. That said, Elastic Search DOES still have very optimal use cases, so is always worth evaluating against your unique requirements - just keep scalability and cost in mind while doing so.
Lastly let's call NoSQL what it is, a Document Store that stores collections of documents (most often in JSON format) and while they also do indexing, offer some semblance of an Authentication and Authorization model, provide CRUD operability (or even SQL support nowadays, which makes the career Enterprise Data Engineer in me giggle, that SQL is now the preferred means of querying data from their NoSQL instances! :D )- Still NOT a traditional database, likely won't provide you with much control over your data's integrity - BUT that is precisely what "NoSQL" Document Stores were designed to work best for - UNSTRUCTURED DATA - where you may not always know what your data model is going to look like from the start, or your use case prioritizes data model flexibility over enforcing data integrity in general (non mission critical data). Last - while most modern NoSQL Document Stores may have SOME features that appear on the surface to resemble RDBMS, I am not aware of ANY in that category at current that could claim to offer all that a relational database does, with Oracle MySQL's DocumentStore being probably the best of both worlds in my opinion (and not just because I've worked with it every day for the last decade, either...).
So - I hope Developers with similar questions come across this thread, and after reading are much better informed to make the most optimal design decisions for their use cases - because if we're all being honest with ourselves - everything we do in our profession is about data - either generating it, transporting it, rendering it, transforming it....it all starts and ends with data, and making the most optimal data storage decisions for your applications will literally define the rest of your project!
Cheers!
This strikes me as like asking "What is the difference between apples and oranges? I've heard they're both types of fruit."
AWS has an overview of the analytics products they offer, which at the time of writing lists 21 different services. They also have a list of database products which includes Redshift and 10 others. There's no particularly obvious reason why these two should be compared, and the others on both pages ignored.
There is inevitably a lot of overlap between the capabilities of these tools, so there is no way to write an exhaustive list of use cases for each. Their strengths and weaknesses, and the other tools they integrate easily with, will change over time, and some differences are a matter of "taste" or "style".
Regarding the two picked out in the question:
Elasticsearch is a product built by elastic.co, which AWS can manage the installation and configuration for. As its name suggests, its core functionality is based around search - it can be used to build a flexible but fast product search for an e-commerce site, for instance. It's also commonly used along with other tools to search and aggregate logs and monitoring data.
Redshift is a database system built by AWS, based on PostgreSQL but optimised for extremely large data sets. It is designed for "data warehouse" applications, where you want to write complex logical queries against the data, like "how many people in each city bought both a toothbrush and toothpaste, this year compared to last year".
Rather than trying to make an abstract comparison of all the different services available, it makes more sense to start from the use case which you actually have, and see which tool best fits that need.

Data Warehouse and Django

This is more of an architectural question than a technological one per se.
I am currently building a business website/social network that needs to store large volumes of data and use that data to draw analytics (consumer behavior).
I am using Django and a PostgreSQL database.
Now my question is: I want to expand this architecture to include a data warehouse. The ideal would be: the operational DB would be the current Django PostgreSQL database, and the data warehouse would be something additional, preferably in a multidimensional model.
We are still in a very early phase, we are going to test with 50 users, so something primitive such as a one-column table for starters would be enough.
I would like to know if somebody has experience in this situation, and that could recommend me a framework to create a data warehouse, all while mantaining the operational DB with the Django models for ease of use (if possible).
Thank you in advance!
Here are some cool Open Source tools I used recently:
Kettle - great ETL tool, you can use this to extract the data from your operational database into your warehouse. Supports any database with a JDBC driver and makes it very easy to build e.g. a star schema.
Saiku - nice Web 2.0 frontend built on Pentaho Mondrian (MDX implementation). This allows your users to easily build complex aggregation queries (think Pivot table in Excel), and the Mondrian layer provides caching etc. to make things go fast. Try the demo here.
My answer does not necessarily apply to data warehousing. In your case I see the possibility to implement a NoSQL database solution alongside an OLTP relational storage, which in this case is PostgreSQL.
Why consider NoSQL? In addition to the obvious scalability benefits, NoSQL offer a number of advantages that probably will apply to your scenario. For instance, the flexibility of having records with different sets of fields, and key-based access.
Since you're still in "trial" stage you might find it easier to decide for a NoSQL database solution depending on your hosting provider. For instance AWS have SimpleDB, Google App Engine provide their own DataStore, etc. However there are plenty of other NoSQL solutions you can go for that have nice Python bindings.