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Is there an option in DynammoDB to store auto incremented ID as primary key in tables? I also need to store the server time in tables as the "created at" fields (eg., user create at). But I don't find any way to get server time from DynamoDB or any other AWS services.
Can you guys help me with,
Thanks.
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DynamoDB does not support auto-incrementing IDs for items. They can be a performance bottleneck at scale, and most workloads are better off with UUIDs anyway. However, there are use cases where auto-incrementing integers are required.
For example, if you have a User table, you might have a UUID as a primary key that uniquely identifies each user, but you might also have user name and email fields (“attributes” in DynamoDB terminology), which also must be unique for that user.
You can use the UpdateItem operation to implement an atomic counter—a numeric attribute that is incremented, unconditionally, without interfering with other write requests. (All write requests are applied in the order in which they were received.) With an atomic counter, the updates are not idempotent.
The sort key of an item is also known as its range attribute. The term range attribute derives from the way DynamoDB stores items with the same partition key physically close together, in sorted order by the sort key value. Each primary key attribute must be a scalar (meaning that it can hold only a single value).
Actually, there are very few features in DynamoDB and this is precisely its main strength. Simplicity.
For the "date" problem, it should be easy to generate it on the client side. May I suggest you to use the ISO 8601 date format ? It's both programmer and computer friendly.
Most of the time, there is a better way than using automatic IDs for Items. This is often a bad habit taken from the SQL or MongoDB world. For instance, an e-mail or a login will make a perfect ID for a user. But I know there are specific cases where IDs might be useful.
In these cases, you need to build your own system. In this SO answer and this article from DynamoDB-Mapper documentation, I explain how to do it. I hope it helps
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Rather than working with auto-incremented IDs, consider working with GUIDs. You get higher theoretical throughput and better failure handling, and the only thing you lose is the natural time-order, which is better handled by dates.
Higher throughput because you don't need to ask Dynamo to generate the next available IDs (which would require some resource somewhere obtaining a lock, getting some numbers, and making sure nothing else gets those numbers). Better failure handling comes when you lose your connection to Dynamo (Dynamo goes down, or you are bursty and your application is doing more work than currently provisioned throughput). A write-only application can continue "working" and generating data complete with IDs, queueing it up to be written to dynamo, and never worry about ID collisions.
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