News

Firm Does SQL Analytics on Amazon DynamoDB NoSQL Database Service

• By David Ramel
• 08/20/2019

California firm Rockset announced its serverless search and analytics engine now does real-time SQL analytics on the NoSQL Amazon DynamoDB database service.

The company specializes in such functionality, pointing its SQL-based analytics engine to NoSQL data stores such as Kafka and S3 storage buckets, along with Amazon DynamoDB.

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) touts for many capabilities -- including backing Web-scale applications such as social networks, gaming, media sharing, and Internet of Things (IoT) -- but performing analytical queries isn't among them, as Rockset pointed out in an announcement.

"With DynamoDB usage maturing in organizations, there is an increasing need for operational analytics and real-time business reporting on it, which requires the ability to search transactional data, run aggregations and join the data with other datasets," the company said.

Rockset noted that an AWS blog post about DynamoDB said: "DynamoDB is not suitable for running scan operations or fetching a large volume of data because it's designed for fast lookup using partition keys. Additionally, there are a number of constraints (like lack of support for powerful SQL functions such as group by, having, intersect and joins) in running complex queries against DynamoDB."

However, with Rockset's ability to run SQL analytical queries on NoSQL data, developers gain the ability to:

• Visualize DynamoDB data in leading SQL-based visualization tools, including BI market leader Tableau, Apache Superset, Redash and Grafana, in real time.
• Build custom interactive dashboards and real-time applications using SQL on DynamoDB data.
• Join DynamoDB data with data in Kafka event streams, Amazon Kinesis or Amazon S3.

Rockset emphasized that its engine is serverless, meaning developers don't have to worry about overhead such as provisioning, capacity planning or server administration.

"Once provided with read access to a DynamoDB table, Rockset reflects changes as they occur in DynamoDB by making use of changelogs in DynamoDB streams," said Venkat Venkataramani, CEO of Rockset. "This gives users an up-to-date (within a few seconds) indexed version of their DynamoDB table in Rockset. And each SQL query against this table is distributed and executed in parallel to ensure that query results return in milliseconds."