A database is the heart of any application. This is where a web application stores all of the user's information, such as credit cards, phone numbers, and addresses. This is what an internal business dashboard uses to track all the reporting features that show the health of your business. This is how a mass eCommerce website tracks all product information such as product name, price, features, and references (storage units). Without a database, there would be no apps: on the web, on your phone or tablet, or on a computer. Fortunately, a cloud database can provide all the benefits you've come to expect, such as autoscaling, high reliability, and fast performance. And, a modern database can benefit from technological advances that make the database much faster and more efficient. Amazon DynamoDB is a database that works in the cloud, but it's also more efficient, faster, and more secure than a traditional on-premises or even database. cloud-based that does not have high-performance features. To understand what it is and how it can benefit your business, it's important to explain some database terms. Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value database, which is a way of describing how data is stored. Unlike a traditional relational database, such as SQL, which assigns a descriptor to each field, a key-value database stores data in a relatively keyless manner. This type of database uses something called an "associative array" to store records. As this is a more advanced form of relational database that uses key values, it is known as NoSQL, which stands for Not Just SQL and means that the database is designed for high performance and is enhanced by the fact that the database data uses key values. While this may seem technical, it's an important distinction because Amazon DynamoDB is designed for speed and performance; It is intended for those who have massive data throughout the needs. It's also a very effective way to use a database in an application, especially if the database contains millions of records. To give you an idea of what this means, Amazon DynamoDB can handle 10 trillion requests per day, peaking at 20 million requests per second. Specifically, this means that there are few commercial applications that can stress the database engine or cause problems in terms of reliability, availability, scaling, or performance. This is why big companies like Lyft, Toyota, and Capital One use Amazon DynamoDB as their database engine of choice.