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.

**View and Contribute to the [Community Notes](https://github.com/eggheadio-projects/learn-aws-dynamodb-from-scratch)!**

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed non-relational (NoSQL) database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.

In other words - DynamoDB is entirely managed by AWS (so it's scaled for us, even if our startup has millions of users), it's a NoSQL database so we don't have to start by defining a detailed schema like in a relational database and it's used by companies like AirBnB, Lyft and Samsung in production.

In this lesson we're going to learn how to create a brand new DynamoDB table from scratch using AWS Console

Create a new DynamoDB table in AWS Console

An empty DynamoDB table is not really useful, the goal of a database is to... well, store data

In this lesson we're going to learn how to add a new item in a DynamoDB table, what kind of fields can we have within a a table, what does it mean that DynamoDB is an NoSQL database and how to edit an item

Add and edit an item in a DynamoDB table using AWS Console

In this quick lesson we're going to learn how to add a new DynamoDB item using a text create item menu in order to use JSON to define fields in newly added items.

As a bonus we're also going to learn what DynamoDB JSON is.

Add a new item to a DynamoDB table in AWS Console using JSON editor

Scan is the simplest type of an operation we can perform on a DynamoDB table in order to receive items from it - it's going to go through the **entire** table and return **all the items** in it (up to 1MB).

It's easy to understand but it's always a good idea to think twice before using it, since it may use your entire read capacity in one go (and this is something you may not want).

In general using `Scan` is okay when:
- you have a very small table (like the one in this video)
- you're exporting all items in your table to another storage system
- you have a very specific use case (and you know what you're doing!)

In this lesson we're going to learn how to use the `Scan` operation in AWS DynamoDB console as well as how to avoid the common misconception when it comes to using the `filter` option for `Scan` - it will **always** go through the entire table, and you can only filter the results you'll receive. Therefore, it cannot be used to "optimize" the Scan operation.



Use a DynamoDB Scan operation (carefully) in AWS Console

AWS Console is really useful but in vast majority of cases - we want to interact with our database programatically.

In this lesson we're going to learn how to create a brand new AWS Lambda function in which we'll perform a `scan` operation on a DynamoDB table.

There are quite a few topics that we'll cover:
- creating a new AWS Lambda function
- creating a brand new IAM Role with required permissions for Lambda function to read data from a DynamoDB table
- creating an environment variable within the AWS Lambda Console to store the name of the DynamoDB table
- using `AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient` API in order to call a `scan` operation on a DynamoDB table

Learn AWS DynamoDB from scratch

Tomasz Łakomy

Course Content