Working with DynamoDB Local and Global Indexes

The client our company has a contract with has launched its online vinyl record store. Unfortunately, several read operations are proving slow and expensive after the migration from MySQL to DynamoDB. The company has requested we test the impact of Local and Global secondary indexes for the dataset. Two operations are particularly problematic, and the development team down the hall has created a test utility that performs the troublesome scan/filter operations against the existing album table. They've also written query functions that are performed against the album_indexed table when it is present, while assuming there is a Local secondary index on the format attribute and a Global secondary index on the title attribute. The client is hoping the cost and performance of returning all albums of a specific format by a specified artist and returning data from the table by album title will improve through the addition of secondary indexes.

Once the table has been created with the partition key of artist_id and sort key of id, as well as a Local secondary index on the format attribute and a Global secondary index on the title attribute, we will load data into the table from the provided EC2 instance with the following command:

index_table_load

Then run the provided test utility with the following command:

pineheadrecords_query