Overloading Global Secondary Indexes in DynamoDB - Amazon DynamoDB

Overloading Global Secondary Indexes in DynamoDB

Although Amazon DynamoDB has a default quota of 20 global secondary indexes per table, in practice, you can index across far more than 20 data fields. As opposed to a table in a relational database management system (RDBMS), in which the schema is uniform, a table in DynamoDB can hold many different kinds of data items at one time. In addition, the same attribute in different items can contain entirely different kinds of information.

Consider the following example of a DynamoDB table layout that saves a variety of different kinds of data.

Table schema for GSI Overloading.

The Data attribute, which is common to all the items, has different content depending on its parent item. If you create a global secondary index for the table that uses the table's sort key as its partition key and the Data attribute as its sort key, you can make a variety of different queries using that single global secondary index. These queries might include the following:

  • Look up an employee by name in the global secondary index, using Employee_Name as the partition key value and the employee's name (for example Murphy, John) as the sort key value.

  • Use the global secondary index to find all employees working in a particular warehouse by searching on a warehouse ID (such as Warehouse_01).

  • Get a list of recent hires, querying the global secondary index on HR_confidential as a partition key value and using a range of dates in the sort key value.