Question: Are DynamoDB table names globally unique?

Answer

No. Table names are unique per AWS account per Region, not globally like S3 bucket names. You can create a table called Orders in us-east-1 and another Orders in eu-west-1, and any other AWS account can have its own Orders tables too. They're separate tables with separate data.

What identifies a table globally is its ARN:

arn:aws:dynamodb:us-east-1:123456789012:table/Orders

The ARN carries the Region and the account ID, so it never collides. You use it in IAM policies and resource-based policies, and data-plane operations such as GetItem and Query also accept it in the TableName parameter. That's how you address a table in another account once its resource-based policy grants you access.

Practical consequences:

• An SDK client pointed at the wrong Region or account won't find your table and returns ResourceNotFoundException.
• Global tables depend on this scoping: every replica has the same name, one per Region.
• When you copy or restore a table within the same Region, the copy needs a new name, because the original name stays taken until that table is deleted.

DynamoDB naming conventions lists the characters a table name can use and suggests patterns for naming tables across environments.

Source: AWS DynamoDB documentation.