How to use Amazon DynamoDB to store spatial data?

Question

I'm wanting to store & retrieve POIs near some location. Plan to use DynamoDB without any other backend service for the app.

How do I store POIs that can be geospatially searched to give nearest 10 results within 10km radius of some location ?

(I would prefer to accomplish this with DynamoDB as it is fully managed DB service & comes with a 0 initial costs.)

Is there any way to convert latitude/longitude to a set of hashes which can be range searched during retrieval ?

Answer 1

Since you are using Java, AWS have a library for doing this https://github.com/awslabs/dynamodb-geo

They also have a series of blog posts explaining how it works https://mobile.awsblog.com/post/TxWTJOSLE7O3J2/Geo-Library-for-Amazon-DynamoDB-Part-1-Table-Structure