My ocean-dynamo gem listed on AWS

The blog post is by Dave Lang, the product manager of Amazon DynamoDB. It appears on AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr’s blog. You can read it here.

The ocean-dynamo gem is a Ruby gem which is a massively scalable Amazon DynamoDB near drop-in replacement for ActiveRecord. ocean-dynamo is fully usable as an ActiveModel and can be used by Rails controllers. Thanks to its structural similarity to ActiveRecord, ocean-dynamo works with FactoryGirl.

It’s also still the only Ruby DynamoDB mapper that implements the one-to-many relation by using indexes as they are supposed to be used. This is required in order to give unlimited scalability.

ocean-dynamo uses only primary indices to retrieve related table items and collections, which means it will scale without limits.

ocean-dynamo is available from RubyGems. Documentation can be found here.

As of now it implements :has_many and :belongs_to fully; this is the most used and most critical relation in practice. The :has_and_belongs_to_many relation will follow. There’s also direct access to primary and secondary indices and iterators available for use until more higher-level relations are added.

I’ll work on the ocean-dynamo gem whenever I have time; I’m with an exciting consultancy firm now, so I don’t have much time to work on other things than AWS certifications at the moment. But ocean-dynamo is very much alive; the future milestones are all in the README.

And it’s an open-source project, so contributions are welcome. :) Everything you need to know is in the README. I’ve already received a couple of pull requests — many thanks to those who have contributed!