The problem with autoscaling DynamoDB is that every time you scale up they shard your table into more partitions but they never merge them back when you scale down. You end up with less throughput per partition once you've scaled back down. The only way to correct this is to completely recreate your table. Does Neptune take this into consideration?
@chadboyda: Good point, per-partition throughput reduces as the #partitions increases but if your load is uniform, it wouldn't impact your overall throughput. Neptune does take this into consideration, although we can't change the inherent DynamoDB behavior. We talk about how to address this problem proactively in our best practices. Our recommendation: create table with 12-month peak throughput and then immediately bring it down to what you want right now. If the table is already created, bump up the throughput to the 12-month peak just once and then bring it down to what you want right now. In either case, this will ensure DynamoDB doesn't change partitions internally when you scale up and scale down within in 12-month peak range. But if you range goes beyond the peak, you'd still run into the problem that you'd described. We've seen in many case, people can predict the highest peak with reasonably high confidence. (think database world where they'd always known this in the past for many years).
Thinking of a house as an investment is foolish. Do you think of your car that way? No. Homes are commodities that like your car depreciate in value. Building homes has like anything manufactured at scale, come down significantly in cost. This is making it possible to build many more homes at a much faster rate. The days of homes being an investment are long over and will probably never return.
Cars and homes are completely different animals. Yes, home prices have been inflated, etc. But property is a very scarce resource and is generally a good investment over the long term. Just because you can build homes quickly doesn't mean that they will be in places that people want to live. Those places will always be highly valued.
Property is a scarce resource in some places. Often the difference is how property is released into the housing markets, and what can be built on it.
For many purposes, Australia and Texas are comparable. Yet Texas has far cheaper housing than Australia. The difference, according to some researchers (and I agree) is that Australia has very complex, overlapping zoning laws and constricted land release; Texas does not.
Another interesting case is Germany. In Germany you have a constitutional right to build a home. Germany has apparently had, in real terms, quite flat house prices for a long time despite not being particularly land-rich compared to places like Texas or Australia.
cars are liabilities: they cost you money to own and you can't sell them for more than you paid for them, classic cars aside. houses are different because...? they still require expensive maintenance like a car, upkeep in the form of insurance and property taxes... houses are only assets when you are better off than renting or you are renting the house and turning a profit.
I think house prices were also driven up by dual income families who can afford more expensive housing.
And once again (I'm going to start keeping track!), we don't want to believe something is true, so we invent a controversy to avoid grappling with its implications. Go us!
Wow, thanks for sharing that observation! What a gem of insight into how easy it is to cross that gray line of usability.
Just a week ago I was watching the Berkely course videos from SIMS 141 on YouTube. This one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYbuDzvWr4s featured Dr. Daniel E. Rose from Yahoo! talking about User Experience Issues in Web Search.
Part of the video, which was recorded 2 years ago, he talks about some of their UI research and how they believe they can improve the interface a lot, primarily focusing on keyword suggestions to help people remember what they were really looking for when they might only remember part of it or something related. Ironically enough a day or two after I watched that video they launched this new feature.
Maybe they should have spent more time observing users. :)
