Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon has introduced DynamoDB, a hosted database for its AWS platform. The new service shares similarities with Apache Cassandra, as it also achieves high scalability using many of the same techniques. Both systems can handle millions of operations per second and have multi-datacenter availability features. However, DynamoDB lacks cross-region replication capabilities and offers a simpler data model compared to Cassandra's more powerful ColumnFamily design. Additionally, while both support Hadoop integration for analytical queries, it is unclear if DynamoDB can partition workloads like Cassandra does. Lastly, Cassandra has an advantage in real-world features such as backup and log-structured storage engine, which allows full and incremental backups without impacting performance.