Wednesday, April 2, 2025

How do I leverage DynamoDB’s secondary indexes for optimal query performance? The answer lies in choosing the right indexing technique. DynamoDB offers two types of secondary indexes: Global Secondary Index (GSI) and Local Secondary Index (LSI). Both can be useful, but which one to choose depends on your use case. For a GSI, you specify a unique attribute pair that serves as the primary key for the index. This allows you to query data across multiple tables without having to physically join them, making it ideal for aggregate queries and large datasets. LSIs are designed for queries that filter or group by a specific column. You can create an LSI on a single table, which enables efficient sorting, filtering, and grouping based on that column. However, there are also alternatives like Elasticsearch and Rockset that integrate seamlessly with DynamoDB. If you anticipate complex searches or need to leverage your existing Elasticsearch skills, consider using the former. In conclusion, selecting the correct indexing technique depends on the query patterns and requirements of your application. By choosing the right combination of GSI, LSI, Elasticsearch, or Rockset, you can ensure optimal performance for your DynamoDB tables.

Companies frequently switch to DynamoDB to build scalable, performance-oriented, and user-centric applications that thrive in real-time environments. DynamoDB is designed to deliver real-time transactional performance, even across a distributed architecture spanning multiple geographic regions. Despite its capabilities, it lacks robust performance in search and analytics data entry patterns.

Search and Analytics on DynamoDB

While NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB are renowned for their impressive scalability features, they primarily support a limited range of operations focused on online transaction processing. Without proper environmental indexing techniques, searching, filtering, and incorporating knowledge becomes a challenging process that requires close attention.

Amazon DynamoDB stores data efficiently beneath the surface by partitioning it across multiple nodes primarily based on a customer-defined partition key attribute present in each item. This could be optionally mixed with a ‘kind’ key to signify the main key. The primary function of the initial key is to serve as a directory, thereby rendering inquiry processes remarkably efficient. A question operation can perform equality comparisons.
on the partition key and comparative operations (>, <, =, BETWEEN) on the type key if specified.

To execute analytical queries that are not covered by the above framework, you must employ a scan operation, typically performed by processing the entire DynamoDB table in parallel. Scans can become increasingly expensive and time-consuming in terms of learning throughput due to the need for a comprehensive review of the entire dataset. As desk size increases, scans tend to slow down significantly.
Extra expertise to tap into, yielding results that surpass expectations! To support complex queries without incurring prohibitively high scan costs, we’ll utilize secondary indexes, a topic we’ll explore further on.

Indexing in DynamoDB

In Amazon DynamoDB, secondary indexes are strategically employed to boost query performance and optimize utility efficiency by creating pointers to frequently accessed fields that can be queried regularly. Operations on secondary indexes can also be used to optimize certain query options by analytic queries that have well-defined requirements.

Secondary indexes consist of creating partition keys and optional composite type keys on fields that require analysis. Secondary indexes on a table can take one of two forms: B-tree and hash.

  • Native secondary indexes: Native secondary indexes, also known as List-based Secondary Indexes (LSIs), enable the extension of the hash function by varying key attributes within a single partition.
  • Secondary world indexes (Global Secondary Indexes), or GSIs, are comprehensive database indices that can be applied to an entire table rather than a specific partition.

While it’s true that relying heavily on GetSchemaItems (GSIs) in Amazon DynamoDB may have a significant financial impact. Without sacrificing query performance or scalability, analytics in DynamoDB can lead to overreliance on secondary indexes and correspondingly higher costs if not optimized for more complex queries or larger scan volumes?

As provisioned capabilities are utilized with indexes, costs can quickly accumulate due to ongoing updates being made directly to the underlying database; therefore, it is essential that all changes are executed within the relevant Global Secondary Indexes (GSIs) accordingly. AWS recommends avoiding excessive write traffic to the root table to prevent throttling and application downtime. As the number of provisioned write capabilities increases in proportion to the variety of configured GSIs, the cost becomes prohibitively high for leveraging multiple GSIs to support a multitude of entry patterns.

DynamoDB’s flexibility can sometimes lead to poorly designed schema indexing, particularly when dealing with complex data structures such as nested buildings, arrays, and objects. Before attempting to index complex information, it may be beneficial for customers to consider denormalizing their data by flattening nested objects and arrays. This could significantly enhance the diversity of writers and associated fees.

Discover how to leverage DynamoDB’s powerful secondary indexing feature for advanced data analysis in our latest blog post.

By aligning your DynamoDB table with a dedicated tool or service serving as a secondary index, you can unlock significant performance and value gains for analytical purposes.

DynamoDB + Elasticsearch

One effective approach to building a secondary index for your data is by combining the capabilities of DynamoDB and Elasticsearch. Cloud-based Elasticsearch, akin to Elastic Cloud and Amazon OpenSearch Service, allows for flexible provisioning and configuration of nodes to accommodate varying index scales, replication requirements, and diverse use cases. While a managed cluster may necessitate certain optimisations for enhanced performance, security, and reliability, its requirements pale in comparison to those of running an EC2-based setup independently.

To ensure seamless integration, we’ll leverage DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda to replace the unsupported method, simplifying the process of writing data from DynamoDB into Elasticsearch. This methodology necessitates the execution of a dual-pronged approach, comprising two distinct stages.

  • Here is the improved/revised text: We establish a Lambda function that processes each event in a DynamoDB stream, leveraging its ability to capture every replacement update and automatically submitting the transformed data to Elasticsearch for indexing.
  • To streamline data processing, we develop a lambda function that submits all existing records from DynamoDB to Elasticsearch, with the option to utilize an EC2 instance and execute a script if the lambda operation exceeds the execution timeout.

To ensure seamless data integration, we must meticulously configure each Lambda function to possess the necessary permissions, thereby preventing any potential data inconsistencies or missed updates in our databases. When data is arranged together with required monitoring, we can retrieve paperwork in Elasticsearch from DynamoDB and utilize Elasticsearch to execute analytical queries on the information.

The significant advantage of this approach is that Elasticsearch facilitates robust full-text indexing capabilities, along with a range of sophisticated analytical query types. Elasticsearch facilitates search capabilities for customers worldwide, pairing seamlessly with Kibana to enable rapid development of interactive dashboards through intuitive visualization tools. When properly configured, clusters enable latency tuning for rapid query execution on knowledge streaming into Elasticsearch.

Despite its benefits, one major disadvantage of the system is the substantial setup and ongoing maintenance costs it may incur. Even when managing Elasticsearch, administrators must contend with complex issues like replication, resharding, index progress, and efficiency tuning to ensure optimal performance?

Elasticsearch’s architecture is characterized by a monolithic design, wherein computational and storage functions are intricately linked, lacking a clear distinction between the two. While sources may occasionally be oversupplied due to limitations in scaling them independently? Additionally, various workloads, comparable in magnitude to reads and writes, will vie for access to the same computing resources.

Elasticsearch struggles to handle updates efficiently. Updating any area will trigger a comprehensive reindexing of the entire document. In Elasticsearch, documents are immutable, which means that updates necessitate creating a new document and marking the original as deleted. This unnecessary computation and I/O expenditure results in redundant reindexing of unchanged fields, necessitating a complete reprocessing of all documentation whenever a replacement occurs.

Due to lambda’s fireplace being triggered as a result of changes in the DynamoDB stream, users may experience latency spikes caused by. To ensure seamless processing of events from DynamoDB streams, precise metrics and real-time monitoring are crucial, guaranteeing accurate occasion tracking and efficient writing into Elasticsearch.

Functionally, through analytical queries, advanced analysis becomes more feasible with the ability to combine multiple indexes, thereby enhancing query capabilities. Elasticsearch users often require denormalization of data, implementing application-side joins or leveraging nested objects and parent-child relationships to overcome the inherent challenge of aggregating complex document structures.


  • Full-text search assist
  • Several types of analytical inquiries exist.
  • You can leverage the latest capabilities of DynamoDB to efficiently manage and query large datasets.
  • Requires sophisticated infrastructure management and close monitoring to ensure seamless ingestion, indexing, replication, and sharding processes.
  • Tight coupling between infrastructure and application architecture can lead to unnecessary overprovisioning of resources and internal compute competition.
  • Inefficient updates
  • To ensure knowledge integrity and consistency between DynamoDB and Elasticsearch requires a dedicated system that verifies the data synchronisation between these two services.
  • The query optimizer cannot choose a join order that combines rows from multiple tables in one pass without first reading all the data into memory.

This approach can effectively function when executing full-text searches across data in DynamoDB and visualizing insights with Kibana’s dashboards. Despite these challenges, tuning and preserving an Elasticsearch cluster for manufacturing settings can be inefficient due to inadequate resource utilisation and limited feature sets, making it a complex task.

DynamoDB + Rockset

Is a fully managed search and analytics database designed primarily for real-time applications that require extremely high query processing rates (QPS)? It’s commonly employed as an external secondary index for retrieving knowledge from Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) databases.

With its integrated connector, Rockset seamlessly synchronizes data with DynamoDB, ensuring real-time knowledge alignment between the two platforms. We’ll define the DynamoDB table we require to synchronize content from, along with a Rockset index set up to track this data. Rockset indexes the entire DynamoDB dataset in a single, comprehensive snapshot, and then continuously synchronizes updates as they occur. The contents of the Rockset assortment remain in perfect synchronization with the DynamoDB supply, deviating by mere seconds under normal conditions.

Rockset ensures seamless information integrity and consistency between its DynamoDB table and the Rockset collection by proactively monitoring the stream’s state, providing real-time visibility into all changes made to the DynamoDB dataset.

Without requiring a predefined schema, a Rockset collection can seamlessly evolve by automatically adapting to changes in fields being added/removed or alterations to the structure/format of data stored in DynamoDB. With this enabled, seamless data integration becomes a reality, eliminating the need for additional ETL processes.

The Rockset assortment, sourced from DynamoDB, enables seamless querying capabilities in conjunction with SQL, making it easily accessible to developers without the need to learn a domain-specific language. The solution is designed to handle queries that cater to various purposes over a RESTful API or leverage shopper libraries across multiple programming languages. Rockset enables native processing of complex JSON data structures, including deeply nested arrays and objects, thereby unlocking the ability to execute advanced analytical queries with millisecond latency, leveraging automated indexing across all fields.

Rockset has revolutionized data processing by enabling the isolation of workloads into distinct compute units, while still leveraging a unified and shared repository of up-to-date information. This enables customers to achieve greater resource efficiency by supporting concurrent consumption and querying or multiple applications on the same dataset.

Additionally, Rockset prioritizes safety through robust data encryption and implements role-based access control to regulate user entry and ensure secure information management. With Rockset, customers can effortlessly sidestep the need for Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes, as data is automatically organized into a set upon arrival. Customers have the flexibility to manage the lifecycle of their information by setting up automatic retention policies that proactively purge outdated data. With robotic management of knowledge ingestion and question serving, we’re able to focus on crafting and deploying real-time dashboards and applications, eliminating the need for infrastructure administration and operations.

Rockset facilitates seamless synchronization with DynamoDB by enabling in-place field-level updates, thereby circumventing the need for costly reindexing operations. Through informed selection, evaluation, and optimal application, determining the most suitable tool for a specific task.


  • Designed to accommodate high-volume traffic and support real-time processing requirements.
  • Fully serverless. None.
  • Seamless compute-to-compute separation ensures predictable efficiency and environmentally sustainable resource utilization.
  • Ensure real-time synchronization between DynamoDB and Rockset, guaranteeing they remain never more than a few seconds apart.
  • What are the key differences in data schema between DynamoDB and Rockset that require monitoring for consistency? The ability to ensure seamless data integration between these two NoSQL databases is crucial for a scalable and efficient data architecture. To guarantee accuracy, I will need to continuously track any discrepancies or variations that may arise from data ingestion, processing, or storage.
  • Optimized data structures generating rapid query response times through automated indexing.
  • Efficient in-place updates enable real-time data refreshes without the need for time-consuming reindexing, thereby significantly reducing knowledge latency.
  • Combines insights from various sources, akin to Amazon Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Amazon S3, and other prominent platforms.

We’ll leverage Rockset to implement our solution without worrying about operational, scaling, or maintenance hurdles. This could significantly accelerate the pace of real-time applications. If you wish to leverage your DynamoDB expertise by building a utility using Rockset, start exploring for free.



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