Using Global Secondary Index write sharding for selective table queries in DynamoDB

Applications frequently need to identify a small subset of items in an Amazon DynamoDB table that meet a certain condition. When these items are distributed randomly across the partition keys of the table, you could resort to a table scan to retrieve them. This option can be expensive, but it works well when a large number of items on the table meet the search condition. However, when the key space is large and the search condition is very selective, this strategy can cause a lot of unnecessary processing.

A better solution can be to query the data. To enable selective queries across the entire key space, you can use write sharding by adding an attribute containing a (0-N) value to every item that you will use for the global secondary index partition key.

The following is an example of a schema that uses this in a Critical-Event workflow:

Using this schema design, the event items are distributed across 0-N partitions on the GSI, allowing a scatter read using a sort condition on the composite key to retrieve all items with a given state during a specified time period.

This schema pattern delivers a highly selective result set at minimal cost, without requiring a table scan.