This intermediate course is the second in a series of courses in the Developing with Amazon DynamoDB curriculum. In this course, you will learn about the different use cases for queries and scans used to return data subsets from your Amazon DynamoDB tables. You will learn how to create secondary indexes programmatically for alternate groupings of table attributes. You will also gain an understanding of how to design your indexes to best fit with your table access patterns to improve performance and efficiency.

• Course level: Intermediate
• Duration: 2.5 hours

Activities

This course includes animations, video demonstrations, interactive content, knowledge checks, and an optional paid self-paced lab.

Course objectives

In this course, you will learn to:

• Analyze and evaluate when to use Scan operations and indexes
• Create a global secondary index for a table programmatically
• Interact with items in a DynamoDB table using secondary indexes
• Optimize global secondary indexes for improved efficiency

Intended audience

This course is intended for:

• New or experienced developers interested in learning how to interact with nonrelational databases in the cloud, and specifically DynamoDB
• Database architects
• Data engineers

Prerequisites

We recommend that attendees of this course have:

• Familiarity with DynamoDB and its features
• Working experience with database design or data modeling practices for key-value databases
• Completed at least one of these digital trainings: Amazon DynamoDB Service Introduction, Amazon DynamoDB Service Primer, or Exploring the DynamoDB API and AWS SDKs.
• Working experience with architecting and developing on AWS and planning and designing databases on AWS.
• Working knowledge of one or more high-level programming languages (Python, Java, Node.js, or .NET)

Course outline

Lesson 1: Using secondary indexes

• Finding and fetching data with Scan and Filter
• Creating indexes to regroup attributes
• Designing indexes according to access patterns
• Interactive knowledge check

Lesson 2: Interacting with DynamoDB tables using secondary indexes

• Gaining insights into key schemas
• Querying secondary indexes
• Evaluating index impact on operations
• Interactive knowledge check

Lesson 3: Optimizing indexes for efficiency

• Structuring the base table data for efficiency
• Structuring indexes for efficiency
• Analyzing use cases
• Interactive knowledge check

Lesson 4: Course Wrap-Up

• Course summary
• Course assessment
• (Optional) Lab: Amazon DynamoDB Scans, Queries, and Indexes