Rick Houlihan
@houlihan_rick
Followers
14,916
Following
148
Media
579
Statuses
5,349
Husband, father. I do NoSQL for grownups. Field CTO for Strategic Accounts @MongoDB . Inventor of @DynamoDB #SingleTableDesign . Opinions my own.
Joined December 2012
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
Republican
• 769438 Tweets
woozi
• 365076 Tweets
Thomas Matthew Crooks
• 322119 Tweets
#MissUniverseThailand2024
• 169724 Tweets
#Wimbledon
• 152024 Tweets
AR-15
• 145492 Tweets
Alcaraz
• 117671 Tweets
Shannen Doherty
• 112137 Tweets
Djokovic
• 110700 Tweets
Novak
• 74724 Tweets
Charmed
• 46822 Tweets
Brenda
• 39039 Tweets
Beverly Hills 90210
• 34796 Tweets
#talkwithwin
• 30342 Tweets
Joshua Zirkzee
• 27916 Tweets
Pogacar
• 23401 Tweets
#キン肉マン
• 19529 Tweets
Prue
• 18945 Tweets
Oğuz Aydın
• 18441 Tweets
マナ獣神化改
• 17354 Tweets
Jacoby Jones
• 15234 Tweets
推しの子コラボ
• 15130 Tweets
天城先生
• 15053 Tweets
マリノス
• 12880 Tweets
ActBlue
• 11123 Tweets
Carlitos
• 10185 Tweets
@notshenetworks
They had trouble paying house cleaners and nannies? What a joke. Cleaning the house was a group effort in my family and daycare was sitting on the front doorstep after school waiting for my Mom to get back from work. My parents sacrificed their own needs for our groceries.
25
69
7K
Jeff Bezos once said if you mention the words "work/life balance" during an interview at Amazon you are a no hire.
After a month at
@MongoDB
it is 5PM on Friday and I do not feel like there are a dozen things I have to get done before the weekend starts.
I can get used to this.
24
60
2K
@rickyschroder13
A mentally disturbed kid shoots three people, killing two of them and you fund his bail to get profile views. The country we live in allows it, but the fact that you do it is disgusting.
26
21
1K
I love contributing to projects that impact the world. Last year I helped the Government of India standup the world's largest COVID vaccine registry and it has maintained 100% availability since launch, peaking at over 150K req/sec. I am so proud that my work is saving lives.
28
149
961
My 2023 advice for all young engineers:
Respect a running system. There are reasons it works that way, most of which will be uncovered when you try to replace it.
Make incremental changes, don't burn the building down.
No one way doors. Never be unable to rollback.
26
224
859
@granthyarbrough
@notshenetworks
Agree, but driving an Audi and hiring nannies and housekeepers are choices that have little to do with affordable daycare. Struggling to pay those bills is a choice.
1
5
817
Serverless means:
1. Never having to patch another OS.
2. Never being paged when a rack goes down.
3. Never needing to rollout software on a hundred nodes.
4. Never paying for idle infrastructure.
5. Never losing business because you can't scale.
22
130
669
When discussing modernization, remember the "legacy" service is the one that is actually working.
Always respect a running system.
Make incremental changes, don't boil the ocean.
Measure the impact, understand what happened.
No one way doors, never be unable to rollback.
18
97
467
Most seem to miss this young woman's point. She expects a degree she was groomed to obtain by our "for profit" education system should qualify for a job with better pay than sushi server. Instead she is saddled with debt and cannot take the entry level gig. She has a legit gripe.
Costco’s new CEO started at the company operating forklifts, and worked his way up to CEO after 40 years
Meanwhile this 25 year old gen Z woman expects to be making $150,000 a year because she has a marketing degree
4K
3K
38K
29
11
384
I hear a lot of criticism of the work I did on DynamoDB Single Table Design these days. I even saw
@alexbdebrie
apologizing for being an advocate the other day. The core concept behind STD, however, has always been the same as it is for all
#NoSQL
databases.
What is accessed
17
35
323
Life no longer shines for my family as it did only 2 days ago. I am not sure it ever will again. My youngest son has lost his battle with mental illness. It appears his passing was unintentional, but we will never see him again. My heart is broken. We love you forever Henri.
181
0
296
My entire career I have been told I am wrong.
10 patents in virtualization, complex event processing, and microprocessor design,
2 products acquired by Fortune 500 companies.
WW Technical Leader - NoSQL Services
@awscloud
Your critics are wrong, listen to your own voice.
9
24
294
@Jules31415
The problem with this statement is you are assuming 96% of Americans agree with you. The reality is its just the intolerant ones that do. All of you are welcome here just like everyone else, but you need to understand most of us actually do not agree with you.
14
4
283
I almost missed my career in tech. I dropped out of school in 1983 after a stupid BB gun battle blinded me in my right eye and benched the idea of using ROTC or football to pay for it. My uncle got me a job in the parts warehouse at NCR in Mountain View.
At NCR I designed my
24
9
262
"This session was the best ever, by far. If there is a Voyager 3, a video of this session should be sent in the ship to tell other species how advanced we are."
Best feedback comment ever. Video should be up soon.
7
20
247
Almost 30 years later the best bang for the buck programming language is still Java. Managed framework, robust API, easy to learn, efficient and performant even if it is a memory hog. Rust scales a bit better but the mental tax is high. For most workloads Java is a solid choice.
43
46
245
There is a story about how when Amazon realized that 70% of their access patterns were key-value queries for a single row of data they decided to move to
@DynamoDB
. This story is true, but making the other 30% work was my team's job.
#SingleTableDesign
2
23
244
Talked to a >$1B retailer based this morning that is running all enterprise operations on
@DynamoDB
for $1,200/month. Provisioned for peak load with legacy technology they would be paying more than 10 times that.
Pay for what you use and no more with
#CloudNative
#NoSQL
8
23
239
In November 2018 I delivered a session at re:Invent on the NoSQL design patterns my team developed at Amazon. I had one follower when I started tweeting about that content. Today I have almost 11K and I am blown away by the support that I have received over the years.
Thank you.
14
2
238
Does anyone else out there go through life feeling both incredibly smart and completely stupid at the same time or is it just me?
36
2
228
I never graduated from college and my first real job was construction laborer. If I listened to folks who said I can't do it, I am not good enough, or the risk of failure is too high I would still be digging ditches. Glad I chose not to and screw y'all who did that. 😛
9
11
204
Companies always say they want out of the box thinkers, but once they find them all they do is try to put them in a box.
8
37
203
Rest in Peace, Henri.
We will always love you and we will miss you forever.
9
2
201
This life lesson was a challenge for me early in my career, but it is the most powerful one I have learned:
Success happens to those who are willing to embrace an opportunity even when you are not sure you can do it. Do not fear failure, learn from it.
7
38
193
I was recently asked why AWS AppSync does not support
#SingleTableDesign
without a custom resolver. When AppSync was built there was a Senior PE who thought those patterns made no sense so they designed the DynamoDB integration without me. The result contradicts best practices.
14
21
185
Earn Trust. That was always my favorite LP at Amazon.
Always work in good faith with your customers and team. Embrace truth and don't filter reality to match preconceived belief. Be open minded to new ideas and let everyone contribute.
Trust stops when minds close.
6
9
186
I have been working with
#NoSQL
technology for 15 years and have never seen non-relational data.
7
18
185
The last time
@jim_scharf
and I teamed up DynamoDB happened. This time it's going to be even more amazing. Big news from
@MongoDB
.
10
17
179
So it finally happened. I had a Design Review with a customer the other day who is leaving DynamoDB because their cost has gone through the roof as they scaled. They listened to one of the most vocal critics of Single Table Design and went with a multi-table pattern instead. They
10
18
176
Cleaned out the closet and found this award I received for leading the Amazon NoSQL Blackbelt team. We educated 25K developers, migrated thousands of services to
#NoSQL
, and shutdown 3K Oracle server instances. Before that
#SingleTableDesign
did not exist, now it is everywhere.
3
6
171
Been digging into
@AWSAmplify
, GraphQL and AppSync lately. Here is an example of how to build a complex object behind an AppSync API with a single
@DynamoDB
query using a Response Mapper. Pretty cool stuff.
#NoSQL
#SingleTableDesign
8
33
167
Come join me at re:Invent and learn how to model complex relational data in NoSQL. I will be discussing design patterns and best practices for DynamoDB, modeling for Document versus Wide Column databases, as well as diving deep into complex single table design.
4
39
165
Just found out a patent I wrote on index key overloading was granted a few months ago. This is number 10 for me, and my first specific to
#NoSQL
technology.
I would never have imagined when I wrote my first line of code I would still be inventing at 57.
6
2
158
I love it when non-technical people tell me that the content I submit for a technical session will not be interesting for the audience. In 2018 I was also told this before I delivered the most popular breakout session in re:Invent history.
11
10
153
If you want to guarantee mediocrity in your workforce then simply treat all your employees equally and your best and brightest will leave and go someplace where they are recognized.
9
18
148
@BradHensonPro
Not every foul will be seen every time. The fact is an official threw the flag on an obvious foul. Complaining about that is ridiculous.
19
0
147
You cannot promote everyone, so if all must have a "growth plan" then the HR plan is move up or move out. Growth happens when people enjoy work and return value to the business. Don't knock IC's who are good at what they do and don't want more, you cannot scale without them.
6
13
146
I had the amazing privilege last summer of designing the schema for one of the world's largest COVID-19 vaccine registration services which is now in production hitting 7K TPS and handling over 1.2M registrations and 1.5M vaccinations daily.
@DynamoDB
#NoSQL
#SingleTableDesign
9
14
144
1 hour until I present live to a real audience for the first time in awhile. I have gotten used to talking to my webcam...feels like the first time all over again.
13
5
143
People who argue against
#serverless
talk about vendor lock in and cost of AWS Lambda. People who actually use it glow about how much they are saving and how agile their teams are without having to maintain physical infrastructure.
I trust user testimonials over FUD.
AWS Lambda switched to "per ms billing" on Dec 1st 2020.
Despite continued adoption and shifting more workload to Lambda, our December bill for our Lambda workload will come in at ~40% or less compared to previous months.
Keep it coming,
@awscloud
.
#serverless
for the win!
10
63
315
6
30
140
Things I get now that I work with
@MongoDB
:
Indexing JSON values and list attributes!
Full Text and Geospatial indexes!
Aggregation queries!
Compound indexing!
Things I lose:
Manual write sharding
Weird DynamoDB JSON
Built for no purpose databases
I can live with that.
12
14
136
Buy this book now! This is the first useful guide on NoSQL data modeling. Everything else I have seen is full of bad assumptions and anti-patterns. Alex did a fantastic job documenting and enhancing the common NoSQL design patterns we use at AWS.
2
22
134
A common critique of NoSQL is that optimizing the data model for the access patterns of the application is hard to do unless they are well understood.
If you are coding without understanding what queries you need then you need to be writing user stories, not code.
5
21
132
For many people "working hard" means spending a lot of time ensuring management thinks they are rock stars. The ones who actually are spend more time helping peers and customers than messaging up the org. If you want to know who your rock stars really are then ask your team.
5
16
132
An NFT is nothing more than a web address that points to a server that hosts some content. There is no guarantee whatsoever that content will always be available or that it will not change. Buying an NFT is paying for a URL string. Dumbest idea ever.
9
23
130
With well over 200K views the 2018 DAT401 breakout is by far the most popular session in
@AWSreInvent
history. Thanks to everyone who has taken time to watch and learn about modeling data for
@DynamoDB
.
#SingleTableDesign
#NoSQL
8
14
129
I joined Twitter in 2012 when I was at a trendy startup and all the execs had to not be lame. In 2018 I had 1 follower when I presented on
#SingleTableDesign
at re:Invent. Now I have almost 10K.
I am blown away that you all think my words are worth your time.
Thank you.
8
0
128
I am tired of technical evangelists explaining things they do not understand by delivering canned content and running through lists of talking points then stumbling on questions.
There is no substitute for knowing what you are talking about. Learn before trying to teach others.
6
13
127
Finally got around to setting up a Pi-hole. Web browsing was noticeably faster immediately and 24 hours later thousands of requests blocked on my home network. Highly recommend doing this.
10
12
126
I have no more words to write, but so many more tears to shed. A piece of me is gone. I will never be whole again.
34
0
128
Changing your mind when presented with information that contradicts your belief is an indication of intelligence, not a sign of weakness.
3
24
122
Ran into a young SDE the other day in the vaccine line who told me all about
#NoSQL
was and why it was better than RDBMS. He talked so much I was not able to get a word in sideways so I just listened and smiled.
5
1
120
The most important lesson I learned at Amazon is that whenever you don't think you need to worry about designing for scale you are wrong.
4
21
118
@JesseNews3LV
Chandler Jones, Jimmy G, and drafting an injured DE with his only first round pick pretty much sums up Ziegler's career as a GM.
He was awful.
3
1
117
You are not old school unless you remember when this was the fast Internet.
12
3
119
3 hours until I go on stage to talk about how
#NoSQL
will eventually rule our data universe, the virtues of single table design and why Cloud Native NoSQL is the only choice for modern apps.
@dynamodb
#reInvent2019
#AWS
4
16
114
Here is my latest contribution to the re:Invent library. As always it was both an honor and a pleasure to speak at this amazing event. My session was oversubscribed once again. Thank you to everyone who takes the time to listen to my message.
6
22
117
Join me this Wednesday for another
#NoSQL
data modeling session on
@DynamoDB
Office Hours. This time I will be using the web based data modeler to design an Online Banking service.
#SingleTableDesign
Wednesday 5/5
@9
:00AM PDT
6
22
116
It is easy to throw out the old stack and start building something better, but the devil is in the details. The best migration plans avoid problems by making incremental changes over time to move to a target state.
Always respect a running system.
5
16
112
Grief is not constant, it is intermittent and polymorphic. A moment spent quietly contemplating what could have been. An explosion in your brain overriding every input while you scream at the world from inside your own head. Losing a piece of your soul is hard.
2
2
113
This is why
#SingleTableDesign
is superior to multi-table. Numbers don't lie. Understand how to model data in
#NoSQL
if you want performance.
@DynamoDB
7
34
111
Join
@rafalwilinski
and I tomorrow on
@DynamoDB
Office Hours. We will be modeling a simple customer order service using the following schema and exploring the new
@dynobase
table modeler.
Wednesday 11/2
@9
:00AM PST
5
14
112
Reviewed a timecard reporting service yesterday that will be supporting ~2K field engineers. The team is currently billed $3K/month by their outsourced IT provider for a redundant RDBMS solution. The workload is going to be free tier on
@DynamoDB
.
25WCU/25RCU/25GB
Always free.
3
9
111
Tomorrow on
@DynamoDB
Office Hours
@alexbdebrie
will be joining for a discussion on Single vs. Multi-table Design, when Elasticsearch makes sense, managing concurrency, pagination and more.
3/24 - - 9:00AM PDT
4
20
110
AWS PM's tell me I am wrong about how important UI/UX is to them, but nothing speaks louder than the volumes on uncurated content that is spread around the docs. You never really know if what you are reading is what you will find when you open the UI.
14
10
108
I often hear how hard it is to model data in
#NoSQL
compared to RDBMS, but nobody ever talks about optimizing SQL. Usually when I ask a group of SDE's how to use a query analyzer I get blank stares.
In NoSQL all you need is a spreadsheet to model data. It does not get easier.
10
8
110
In 2017 we created a Distributed Lock Pattern for Amazon retail that was released as the Amazon DynamoDB Distributed Lock Client. Recently a customer asked if there was a similar library for
@MongoDB
, so I forked the project and abstracted the data layer.
1
10
105
My Christmas present finally arrived. I would never have done this myself, but it is pretty cool.
Thank you
@simhou2002
11
1
106
Palazzo was overbooked so we got upgraded. They certainly know how to upgrade a room in Vegas.
9
1
104
My personal Leadership Principles are derived from
@patricklencioni
's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I read this book two decades ago and it still resonates today:
1. Earn Trust - Communicate openly and honestly at all times. Always remember trust is earned, not given. Don't play
0
7
104
3
13
104
GraphQL apps are usually really good at burning infrastructure to access data inefficiently. They don't have to be, but doing it right requires the same knowledge as using any database properly. Efficiency has no shortcuts.
7
16
103
The best technical evangelists are doers, not just talkers. If you want to succeed in devrel then you better be able to walk the walk when its time to code. Make time to solve real customer problems every now and then. Keep your skills sharp.
1
9
100
ACID is an anti-pattern within a distributed system.
1. Requires process synchronization.
2. Potential deadlocks/brownouts.
3. High overhead.
Systems that scale are non-blocking. Use optimistic concurrency, versioning or event sourcing patterns to manage consistency instead.
5
15
99
Using NoSQL incorrectly is becoming so normal that anti-patterns are turning into tribal knowledge and the flood of bad guidance that permeates the Internet is preventing people from realizing the benefit.
If you want good results then learn how to use a tool before you use it.
8
16
101
Do you leave your car running when it's parked in a garage? Why are you paying for your IT infrastructure when your customers are sleeping? Serverless means pay for only what you use and save up to 90% on IT cost.
@DynamoDB
@AWSLambda
@awsserverless
3
24
99
This came out of the blue from one of our Senior Developers here at
@MongoDB
and it really made my day. Feedback like this is amazing validation. I am so honored that really smart people like this find value in my work.
8
4
98
Need to support low frequency ad hoc queries against operational data? Deploy with
@DynamoDB
->Firehose->S3<-Athena for the best of both worlds. Fast and consistent performance for your OLTP workloads with support for ad hoc OLAP on the fly.
It does not get better than this.
7
9
97
@MissAmyTobey
I was never a great coder. I failed every time I was put through one of those ordeals. My best code was refactored by someone else before it went to prod.
I have 9 patents, wrote the first VM hypervisor, and invented Single Table Design for DynamoDB.
I am the idea guy.
2
9
95
#SingleTableDesign
has two basic concepts, Polymorphic Tables and Access Pattern Overloading. The first is about storing all data on one table in related groups of entity objects. The second is about indexing objects on multiple dimensions to group and sort them in many ways.
4
17
94