Is there a way to retrieve all items without an attribute in DynamoDB?

Question

So I recently added a Time To Live attribute to my DynamoDB table (850 million records). I'm trying to write a script to backfill the Time To Live attribute in my table.

I'm want to retrieve all the items in this the table without the Time To Live attribute set, so I can backfill these items with the Time To Live using UpdateItem.

Is there a way to do this in DynamoDB?

Answer 1

If your database is small, a simple scan will work:

var params = {
    TableName: "<YOUR TABLE NAME>",
    FilterExpression: "attribute_not_exists(time_to_live)"
};

var results = dynamodb.scan(params);

// update records here

If your DB is large, you may want to consider the more thoughtful approach outlined by AWS , which includes using AWS EMR to backfill data in DynamoDB. Bonus, the linked article discusses backfilling time to live attributes in DynamoDB!