20x Quicker Ingestion with Rockset’s New DynamoDB Connector

Since its introduction in 2012, Amazon DynamoDB has been one of the vital fashionable NoSQL databases within the cloud. DynamoDB, not like a standard RDBMS, scales horizontally, obviating the necessity for cautious capability planning, resharding, and database upkeep. In consequence, DynamoDB is the database of alternative for corporations constructing event-driven architectures and user-friendly, performant purposes at scale. As such, DynamoDB is central to many fashionable purposes in advert tech, gaming, IoT, and monetary providers.

Nonetheless, whereas DynamoDB is nice for real-time transactions it doesn’t do as nicely for analytics workloads. Analytics workloads are the place Rockset shines. To allow these workloads, Rockset gives a totally managed sync to DynamoDB tables with its built-in connector. The info from DynamoDB is routinely listed in an inverted index, a column index and a row index which might then be queried rapidly and effectively.

As such, the DynamoDB connector is considered one of our most generally used knowledge connectors. We see customers transfer large quantities of knowledge–TBs price of knowledge–utilizing the DynamoDB connector. Given the dimensions of the use, we quickly uncovered shortcomings with our connector.

How the DynamoDB Connector At the moment Works with Scan API

At a excessive stage, we ingest knowledge into Rockset utilizing the present connector in two phases:

1. Preliminary Dump: This part makes use of DynamoDB’s Scan API for a one-time scan of the whole desk
2. Streaming: This part makes use of DynamoDB’s Streams API and consumes steady updates made to a DynamoDB desk in a streaming trend.

Roughly, the preliminary dump provides us a snapshot of the information, on which the updates from the streaming part apply. Whereas the preliminary dump utilizing the Scan API works nicely for small sizes, it doesn’t at all times do nicely for giant knowledge dumps.

There are two most important points with DynamoDB’s preliminary dump because it stands right this moment:

• Unconfigurable phase sizes: Dynamo doesn’t at all times stability segments uniformly, typically resulting in a straggler phase that’s inordinately bigger than the others. As a result of parallelism is at phase granularity, we’ve seen straggler segments enhance the full ingestion time for a number of customers in manufacturing.
• Fastened Dynamo stream retention: DynamoDB Streams seize change information in a log for as much as 24 hours. Which means that if the preliminary dump takes longer than 24 hours the shards that had been checkpointed in the beginning of the preliminary dump could have expired by then, resulting in knowledge loss.

Bettering the DynamoDB Connector with Export to S3

When AWS introduced the launch of recent performance that permits you to export DynamoDB desk knowledge to Amazon S3, we began evaluating this method to see if this could assist overcome the shortcomings with the older method.

At a excessive stage, as a substitute of utilizing the Scan API to get a snapshot of the information, we use the brand new export desk to S3 performance. Whereas not a drop-in alternative for the Scan API, we tweaked the streaming part which, along with the export to S3, is the idea of our new connector.

Whereas the outdated connector took nearly 20 hours to ingest 1TB finish to finish with manufacturing workload operating on the DynamoDB desk, the brand new connector takes solely about 1 hour, finish to finish. What’s extra, ingesting 20TB from DynamoDB takes solely 3.5 hours, finish to finish! All it’s worthwhile to present is an S3 bucket!

Advantages of the brand new method:

• Doesn’t have an effect on the provisioned learn capability, and thus any manufacturing workload, operating on the DynamoDB desk
• The export course of is quite a bit sooner than customized table-scan options
• S3 duties will be configured to unfold the load evenly in order that we don’t must cope with a closely imbalanced phase like with DynamoDB
• Checkpointing with S3 comes totally free (we only in the near past constructed assist for this)

We’re opening up entry for public beta, and can’t wait so that you can take this for a spin! Signal-up right here.

Completely satisfied ingesting and pleased querying!