Question: Can DynamoDB do aggregations?

Answered by Rafal Wilinski
Answer
A simple answer is that DynamoDB does not support aggregations. Since DynamoDB is a NoSQL database and it has very limited query functionality. So it is impossible to perform aggregation from a DynamoDB table by directly calling the DynamoDB API.
But there are a few tools and techniques to achieve the aggregations:
- Perform a table scan and apply the logic on the application side to do the aggregation functions. But this is not a practical solution for the larger dataset.
- Use a materialized index on DynamoDB. The maximum number of entries could be stored in a separate table and updated as new records are added if your table is write-only and does not allow changes or deletions. This strategy isn't a universal fix, although it can work in some limited situations.
- Use Amazon Redshift to perform analytics.
- Utilize DynamoDB streams to perform data aggregation asynchronously and query an aggregated table to retrieve the aggregated data.
Other Common DynamoDB FAQ (with Answers)
- How to divert the traffic from S3 to DynamoDB?
- Are DynamoDB table names supposed to be unique?
- Can DynamoDB be used like a relational database?
- Can DynamoDB table have adhoc attributes?
- Can DynamoDB store relational data?
- Is DynamoDB similar to MongoDB?
- Why is DynamoDB better than MongoDB?
- Is DynamoDB columnar database?
- How to ensure delete integrity in DynamoDB?
- How to grab data from AWS DynamoDB?
- What is the maximum number of partitions in DynamoDB?
- Is DynamoDB open source?
- Is DynamoDB good for unstructured data?
- Does DynamoDB support cross-region replication?
- In DynamoDB, can I use UUID as the partition key?
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