Dynamoid: An ORM for Amazon's DynamoDB

Dynamoid is (another) gem I developed, but I think it’s a lot more exciting than rapnd! I started work on it over Christmas but didn’t really get a lot of opportunity to focus on it again until recently, when work become relatively less busy.

Dynamoid owes a lot to Mongoid — it’s essentially trying to be for DynamoDB what Mongoid is for MongoDB. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really do a whole lot of exciting stuff yet…

But it will soon! The TODO list is particularly exciting:

• Association magic: The standard fare like belongs_to, has_many, habtm.
• Automatic value separation and joining: Values for DynamoDB keys are limited to 64KB, but with a clever framework we can get around that constraint with multiple keys conjoined together.
• Automatic key distribution: As per Amazon’s provisioned throughput guidelines, keys that are frequently accessed incur a throughput penalty due to traffic concentration. Dynamoid will distribute keys that you specify across a number of duplicated keys, and will concatenate them together when read.
• Not-gimpy finders: Criteria like you’re used to with ActiveRecord, so that you can do User.where(:name => ‘Josh’) rather than User.find_by_name(‘Josh’).
• Range keys for models and indexes: To support queries like User.where(:created_at.gt => DateTime.now - 1.day)

I hope to have time over the next few days and the weekend to continue improving Dynamoid. Watch this space for further updates.