Our great sponsors
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
This can be quite annoying because it makes you wonder why the high-level API isn't able to deal with these common data types. Part of the reason for this is most likely that floats in Python can be counter-intuitive, so Decimal is a better data type if you want numbers to behave as non-computer-scientists expect it. To learn more about these complexities, check out this discussion on GitHub about implementing float support in boto3 and the Python documentation on the subject. Additionally, DynamoDB has no native DateTime data type, so there is no straightforward mapping.
In order to fix these shortcomings, we can extend boto3 to teach it how to deal with more data types than it can on its own. The code, including some tests for it is available on GitHub, and you can jump straight into that if you're impatient, but we're also going to walk through it and talk about some background info that may interest you.