Read Sample Data

Before we can do anything we have to learn what our data looks like.

DynamoDB provides the Scan API  which can be invoked using the scan CLI command . Scan will do a full table scan and return the items in 1MB chunks. Scanning is the slowest and most expensive way to get data out of DynamoDB; Scanning this on a large table from the CLI might be unwieldy but we know there are only a few items in our sample data so its OK to do here. Try running a scan on the ProductCatalog table:

aws dynamodb scan --table-name ProductCatalog

Use the arrow keys to move up and down through the Scan response. Type :q and hit enter to exit the viewer once you’re done reviewing the response.

Data input and output in the CLI utilizes the DynamoDB JSON format, which is described in the DynamoDB Low-Level API  section of the Developer Guide.

We can see from our data that this ProductCatalog table has two types of products: Book and Bicycle items.

If we wanted to read just a single item, we would use the GetItem API  which can be invoked using the get-item CLI command . GetItem is the fastest and cheapest way to get data out of DynamoDB as you must specify the full Primary Key so the command is guaranteed to match at most one item in the table.

aws dynamodb get-item \
    --table-name ProductCatalog \
    --key '{"Id":{"N":"101"}}'

By default a read from DynamoDB will use eventual consistency because eventually consistent reads in DynamoDB are half the price of a strongly consistent read. See Read Consistency  in the DynamoDB Developer Guide for more information.

There are many useful options to the get-item command but a few that get used regularly are:

  • –consistent-read : Specifying that you want a strongly consistent read
  • –projection-expression : Specifying that you only want certain attributes returned in the request
  • –return-consume-capacity : Tell us how much capacity was consumed by the request

Let’s run the previous command and add some of these options to the command line:

aws dynamodb get-item \
    --table-name ProductCatalog \
    --key '{"Id":{"N":"101"}}' \
    --consistent-read \
    --projection-expression "ProductCategory, Price, Title" \
    --return-consumed-capacity TOTAL

We can see from the returned values:

{
    "Item": {
        "Price": {
            "N": "2"
        },
        "Title": {
            "S": "Book 101 Title"
        },
        "ProductCategory": {
            "S": "Book"
        }
    },
    "ConsumedCapacity": {
        "TableName": "ProductCatalog",
        "CapacityUnits": 1.0
    }
}

That performing this request consume 1.0 RCU, because this item is less than 4KB. If we run the command again but remove the –consistent-read option, we will see that eventually consistent reads consume half as much capacity:

aws dynamodb get-item \
    --table-name ProductCatalog \
    --key '{"Id":{"N":"101"}}' \
    --projection-expression "ProductCategory, Price, Title" \
    --return-consumed-capacity TOTAL

We will see this output:

{
    "Item": {
        "Price": {
            "N": "2"
        },
        "Title": {
            "S": "Book 101 Title"
        },
        "ProductCategory": {
            "S": "Book"
        }
    },
    "ConsumedCapacity": {
        "TableName": "ProductCatalog",
        "CapacityUnits": 0.5
    }
}