Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Node.js

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a powerful expansive cloud infrastructure platform for building modern web applications.

AWS provides services for data, presentation, authentication, security, video encoding, and much more. Offering over 175 fully-featured services from data centers globally, AWS powers a large percentage of the internet.

This playlist covers all of the ways to use the node.js DocumentClient to interact with one or more DynamoDB tables.


note: We do not cover scan() as it is not recommended for most usage and if you need it you'll know how to read the documentation to use it by the end of this collection.

The node.js DynamoDB client comes from the aws-sdk package. We cover how to set up the client with your AWS credentials as well as how to use the callback and promise versions of documentclient functions.

node

Intro to the DynamoDB Node.js DocumentClient

get is how we can take a primary key and get a single DynamoDB item. We cover the basics, like how to get the actual item, as well as more advanced usage with additional options that tell us how much capacity we used, and returning only specific attributes

Getting individual DynamoDB items with node.js using get and promises

Put is responsible for both inserting new items and also completely overwriting items. We cover capacity units and how they are affected by GSIs on a given table, ConditionExpressions for preventing the overwriting of items, as well as how to use ReturnValues

Inserting and replacing items with put in the DynamoDB node.js DocumentClient

This lesson covers using delete to both delete specific items and use ConditionExpressions as an access control mechanism to control who can delete an item.

Deleting (and preventing the deletion) of items in DynamoDB with the nodejs DocumentClient

The `update` function works differently than `put` does. Whereas `put` will insert-or-overwrite, update will update-or-insert. We cover what you can do with an UpdateExpression, which turns out to be a lot.

Inserting items and modifying attributes and nested attributes with update in DynamoDB

batchWrite and batchGet are a way to get the parallelism of sending multiple writes or gets in multiple threads regardless of whether or not your language supports threads. This is particularly interesting when implementing GraphQL node resolvers.

Inserting, Deleting, and Fetching multiple items at a time with batchGet and batchWrite

Transactions allow us to guarantee that a set of operations will succeed or fail as a unit. This is different than the behavior of batchWrite and batchGet. Transactions also enable us to use more of the DynamoDB API, such as Update and ConditionCheck.

DynamoDB: The Node.js DocumentClient

Chris Biscardi

Course Content