What Are Sparse Indexes And How To Create Them In AWS DynamoDB

An easy to understand way of how we can use sparse indexes for powerful data filtering with DynamoDB.

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DynamoDB is a highly scalable and performant noSQL database offered by AWS. There are many techniques you can use to further optimize your database, creating indexes is one of them.

In order to understand what sparse indexes are, we must first understand what indexes are in DynamoDB.

In DynamoDB, we query for data by providing a primary key which uniquely identifies an item in our table. Once we set the partition key and sort key, we cannot change them and so if we need to change the way we access our data (with a particular primary key) for a certain table, we cannot change the attribute which we use to fetch our items on our table.