Courses to elevate your NoSQL data modeling skills

In today’s digital landscape, NoSQL databases have emerged as mature and widely-adopted technologies, both on-premises and in the cloud. These powerful data management solutions have become indispensable for modern applications, offering a range of benefits that traditional relational databases often struggle to match. The inherent low latency, high scalability, and schema flexibility of NoSQL databases make them the preferred choice for applications that demand real-time responsiveness, seamless handling of massive data volumes, and the ability to adapt to rapidly evolving data structures. These characteristics are highly sought after by organizations across various industries, from e-commerce and social media to IoT and big data analytics.

The importance of NoSQL data modeling

The operational complexity of managing on-premises NoSQL deployments has often been a significant challenge for IT teams, requiring specialized expertise in database administration, system administration, and infrastructure management. The rise of cloud-based, fully-managed NoSQL solutions has revolutionized this landscape, allowing organizations to focus on their core business objectives rather than the underlying infrastructure. By leveraging the power of serverless and cloud-native NoSQL offerings, database architects and developers can now concentrate on the critical task of data modeling, which is essential for optimizing the performance and scalability of their applications.

For over 50 years, since the invention of the relational model in 1969, database architects have relied on defining entity-relationship (E/R) models to design the database schema that represents the reality they are modeling. However, the rise of NoSQL databases has introduced a new paradigm in data modeling. Designing effective NoSQL data models requires a distinct set of skills and best practices that differ significantly from the traditional relational approach. In today’s IT job market, the ability to model data for NoSQL databases has become a highly sought-after expertise, as organizations seek to leverage the benefits of these flexible, scalable, and high-performance data management solutions. From document-oriented to graph-based and key-value data models, mastering the nuances of NoSQL data modeling is crucial for optimizing application performance and unlocking the full potential of these modern database technologies.

AWS NoSQL purpose-built databases

AWS provides you and its customers with NoSQL databases that fit a variety of needs. In the table below, you can review each data type, some examples of that data type, and the AWS services that support that use case. It’s important to note that for many solutions, there is more than one database that can work.

For more information about the complete AWS purpose-built database portfolio (NoSQL and SQL), see AWS Cloud Databases.

AWS Training and Certification offers a mix of free, on-demand digital courses, digital classrooms, and virtual/in-person instructor-led classroom trainings that help you learn and/or improve your NoSQL data modeling skills.

Build your NoSQL data modeling skills with AWS Skill Builder

Learn the fundamentals of the AWS Cloud

In case you are new to the AWS Cloud, we recommend you to start from the foundations: learn what the cloud is, the business benefits it provides, its global infrastructure, and its foundational services. To learn all of that, download our AWS Cloud Essentials Ramp-Up Guide to get a comprehensive list of official learning resources provided by AWS Training and Certification.

If you have already experience in the database area, but you are new to the SQL and NoSQL databases services that AWS provides, we recommend you to look at the following free self-paced digital course on AWS Skill Builder:

• AWS Database Offerings, is a 4-hour, fundamental level digital course designed for IT Professionals, Architects, Database Engineers, and Developers. The course provides a basic overview of different database technologies and architectures and introduces you to the various AWS database services. The course also covers the concept of the purpose-built database, which changes the one-size-fits-all methodology that previously existed.
• Introduction to Building with AWS Databases, is a 3-hour, fundamental level digital course designed for IT managers, Business leaders, Database architects, and Developers. The course explores the various databases that AWS offers and helps you understand how each of them solve unique business problems. It introduces you to AWS recommended best practices when designing solutions with AWS databases, and common tools for data migration. This course is designed to help you learn the fundamentals of choosing the right database to support your use case.

It’s with a strong foundational knowledge that you can get the most from our intermediate courses that follow.

Advance your skills with AWS Classroom courses

Build Modern Applications with AWS NoSQL Databases is an intermediate course designed for developers, architects and database engineers who want to build applications that involve complex data characteristics and millisecond performance requirements from their databases.

During this course, you will learn how to build modern applications for the cloud using AWS purpose-built NoSQL databases, how to analyze business use cases and apply advanced features of Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elasticache and Amazon DocumentDB. You will also learn how to implement event-driven architectures using change streams and AWS Lambda. Lastly, you will build a typical modern application with diverse access patterns and real-time scaling needs.

Through a mixture of lecture, instructor demos, three hands-on labs that progress in level of difficulty, and peer discussion, you will engage all the time with an accredited AWS expert instructor with advanced technical knowledge.

AWS Digital Classroom

AWS Digital Classroom courses combine the depth of live classroom training with the convenience of digital learning. They provide comprehensive knowledge and skills enablement through recordings of expert instructors, demonstrations, hands-on labs, knowledge checks, and assessments. Enjoy flexibility in time, location, and pace, along with the ability to pause, rewind, and revisit content. AWS Digital Classroom is available as part of AWS Skill Builder Individual annual subscription and Team subscription.

Click here to get access to the digital classroom.

Gain specialized skills and knowledge with free self-paced digital courses on AWS Skill Builder

Developing with Amazon DynamoDB is a 26-hour, intermediate level digital curriculum, intended for developers, database architects and data engineers. This digital curriculum teaches you how applications interact with Amazon DynamoDB through its API and related AWS services. You will learn how to create and interact with DynamoDB tables and indexes and how to optimize databases for monitoring, performance, and security. You will also learn how to architect applications using DynamoDB design principles. The curriculum includes code examples to help you implement the design patterns and solutions discussed. Additionally, labs are available to reinforce key course content and help you to implement solutions using the AWS SDK for Python, the AWS CLI, and the AWS Management Console. Note: 16 hours, 50 minutes of this curriculum is course materials and 9 hours, 10 minutes is for self-paced labs.

Amazon DynamoDB – Data Modeling Techniques is a 60-minute, intermediate level digital course, intended for developers, database architects and cloud architects. In this course, you explore Amazon DynamoDB data modeling concepts and use cases to help improve your application’s performance, scalability, and resource utilization goals.

Data Modeling for Amazon Neptune is a 60-minute, intermediate level digital course, intended for developers, cloud architects, data engineers and data scientists. This course demonstrates various data modeling scenarios for several use cases with Amazon Neptune. You will learn data modeling best practices, along with options and techniques to model and store data. You will also learn about querying techniques to validate that your data is modeled correctly.

Amazon Timestream – Data Modeling Techniques is a 60-minute, intermediate level digital course, intended for developers, solutions architects, and cloud database architecture designers. This course is specifically designed to empower customers with the knowledge and confidence to design effective data models in Amazon Timestream. Throughout the course, you will delve into key concepts of Timestream, understanding their significance in data modeling, and how they impact performance and cost optimization. You will learn different Timestream data models and how to make informed decisions about which model to choose for specific scenarios. The course will demonstrate how to use some Timestream features to enhance query performance. Finally, this course provides insights on determining whether a single table or multiple tables are more suitable when modeling time-series data for your application. By the end of this course, you will have the required confidence and skills to design robust time-series data models in Amazon Timestream.

Data Modeling for Amazon DocumentDB is a 60-minute, intermediate level digital course, intended for developers, database architects, database engineers, and database administrators. In this course, you will learn the fundamental concepts and best practices of modeling your data with Amazon DocumentDB. You will examine three use cases of modeling or structuring your data, and complete small decision-making exercises to address a hypothetical application need.

Data Modeling for Amazon Elasticache for Redis is 60-minute, intermediate level digital course, intended for database architects, database engineers, and database administrators. In this course, you will learn how to construct effective data models when building solutions with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. You will learn fundamental concepts like keys and data types. You will also examine several use cases and complete small decision-making exercises to choose the correct data type to address a hypothetical application need.

Get hands on with AWS Builder Lab on AWS Skill Builder

Available with an AWS Skill Builder subscription, Lab – Data Modeling for Amazon Neptune is a 60-minute, intermediate lab, intended for cloud operators, data engineers, data scientists, and DevOps engineers. In this lab you will learn to model data using Amazon Neptune to meet specific business requirements. You will use customer, product and order data from sample datasets to build product recommendation system in Amazon Neptune based on a customer’s order history. Learners will use Jupyter notebooks to explore sample data, perform transformations and load data as vertices and edges into Amazon Neptune. Learners will also be able to query, visualize and build product recommendations.

Want to learn more about databases?

If you’re interested in learning more about our AWS Training and Certification offerings for Databases, download our AWS Database Ramp-Up Guide.

We offer many other on-demand digital resources as well as the course Planning and Designing Databases on AWS, available as a Digital Classroom and Classroom training. Planning and Designing Databases on AWS doesn’t focus only on NoSQL databases, but it covers all the database solutions provided by AWS, and it is recommended course for Solutions Architects, Database Architects and Database Developers who need to learn how to choose the appropriate purpose-built database service for a given workload, getting a description for each of them from the architectural standpoint.

Keep an eye on the AWS Training and Certification Blog for our monthly course launch updates (published on last week of each month) and AWS Skill Builder for all the latest training offerings.