What is the difference between storage (S3) and database (DynamoDB) on AWS?

Both S3 and DynamoDB are regional resources.

S3 is an object storage (not block storage)

DynamoDB is NoSQL database (key-value store).

If you try to use S3 as key-value store:

• Listing of buckets/files will cost you money.
• No updates — you cannot update a file, just replace it.
• No indexes.
• Versioning will cost you $$.
• No search.
• No transactions
• No query API (SQL or NoSQL)

If you try to use DynamoDB as file directory:

• Size limitation for an item — 400Kb.
• Read/write throttling.
• You pay for each 4kb/sec you read and 1Kb/sec you write.

UPDATE: Looking for a way to use SQL with S3? Check out Presto.

What is Presto? — Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Querying S3 with Presto

Update2: Do not want to set up EMR cluster for Presto ? Look at Amazon Athena (Google BigQuery competitor).

Other scripts:

• **hive-scripts/hivehoney — **Pull out data from Hive on Windows
• pydemo/teardown Teardown report for Athena and Snowflake
• pydemo/Snowpipe-For-SQLServer Pipe your data from SQL Server to Snowflake