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Amazon DynamoDB Transactions support

Somewhat unexpectedly but quite deservedly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released DynamoDB Transactions at this year’s re:Invent. Until now there was only one “official” additional Java library to support transactions (Java Transaction Library for DynamoDB). In other programming languages widely used in the AWS environment, such as Node.js, Python or Go, you had to use update conditions to create a transactional behavior. Since manual checks had to be implemented in many places, this easily becomes very error-prone. DynamoDB Transactions will now allow you to perform atomic write operations to multiple items of which either all, or none go through. Besides that isolated reads will ensure that read operations applied to one ore multiple items are not interfered by other transactions.

Currently the newly introduced DynamoDB operations, TransactWriteItems and TransactGetItems, are not yet inserted in the official API definition. But I will insert the sections in this post as soon as the operations are documented there.

Operation description from the AWS blog post:

  • TransactWriteItems, a batch operation that contains a write set, with one or more PutItem, UpdateItem, and DeleteItem operations. TransactWriteItems can optionally check for prerequisite conditions that must be satisfied before making updates. These conditions may involve the same or different items than those in the write set. If any condition is not met, the transaction is rejected.
  • TransactGetItems, a batch operation that contains a read set, with one or more GetItem operations. If a TransactGetItems request is issued on an item that is part of an active write transaction, the read transaction is canceled. To get the previously committed value, you can use a standard read.

A nice fact about transactions is that they do not incur any additional costs and they are now available globally in all commercial regions.

If you want to learn more about this topic read the official AWS blog post: New – Amazon DynamoDB Transactions containing a more detailed explanation and samples.

AWS re:Invent 2018 session introducing DynamoDB transactions:

Since I use self-built transactions very often in one of my projects I am very happy about this new feature and will try it out soon. Testimonials will follow!

via GIPHY