advice on appropriate database for click logging reporting

Question

I am about to build a service that logs clicks and transactions from an e-commerce website. I expect to log millions of clicks every month.

I will use this to run reports to evaluate marketing efforts and site usage (similar to Google Analytics*). I need to be able to make queries, such as best selling product, most clicked category, average margin, etc.

*As some actions occur at later times and offline GA doesn´t fullfill all our needs.

The reporting system will not have a heady load and it will only be used internally.

My plan is to place loggable actions in a que and have a separate system store these to a database.

My question is what database I should use for this. Due to corporate IT-policy I do only have these options; SimpleDB (AWS), DynamoDB (AWS) or MS SQL/My SQL

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,

Fredrik

Answer 1

Have you checked this excelent Amazon documentation page ? http://aws.amazon.com/running_databases/ It helps to pick the best database from their products.

From my experience, I would advise that you do not use DynamoDB for this purpose. There is no real select equivalent and you will have hard time modeling your data. It is feasible, but not trivial.

On the other hand, SimpleDB provides a select operation that would considerably simplify the model. Nonetheless, it is advised against volumes > 10GB: http://aws.amazon.com/running_databases/

For the last resort option, RDS, I think you can do pretty much everything with it.