DynamoDB - deleting items - amazon-dynamodb

What is the best approach to delete multiple rows in table?
From AWS documentation I see that to do a deletion I need pass primary key.
That would mean that I need to delete item one by one.
Is it possible to handle deletion of multiple items with single request? (I do not mean batch request.)
How are you handling GDPR right to be forgotten?

Related

Should I make this field a GSI, a regular attribute, or something else in order to have efficient queries?

For my DynamoDB table, I currently have a schema like this:
Partition key - Unique ID, so every item has a completely unique ID
Sort key - none
Attribute - JSON that contains some values
Now, I want to add a new field that will be required for every item and will indicate the specific region (e.g. NA-1, NA-2, JP-1, and so on) and I want to be able to do queries on just this field. For example, I might want to perform a query on my table to retrieve all items with the region NA-1.
My question is should I make this field a GSI? I'm new to DynamoDB so I've been researching online and it seems that using a GSI is preferred when that field may only be present for select items in the table, but my field will be required for every item, so I think using a GSI is not an option.
The other possible option I've seen is performing a scan operation and using a filter expression, but from what I've seen, that's a costly operation because DynamoDB has to look at the entire table part-by-part and then filter afterwards. My table isn't very big right now, but it may become quite large in the future, so I would like a scalable option.
TL;DR Is there someway I can add a mandatory regionID field to my table and perform efficient queries on it? What are some good options I should look into?
Yeah, a GSI might not be the best fit here. Maybe you can somehow make it part of the partition key?
Yes. Perform 2 writes on the table. First row will be what you are currently writing, and the second row will have your region as the partition key. Do not forget use transactions as it is possile that one of the writes does not succeed.
While you can use GSI, you have to realize that it is eventual consistent. It will take some time to update it and you might get inconsistent data if you query soon enough after writing.
DynamoDB is a distributed data-store i.e. it stores the data not in a single server but does partitions using the provided partition key (PK). This means your data is spread across multiple servers and brings the limitation that you can query a single partition at a time.
Coming back to your query pattern,
retrieve all items with the region X
You need to add region-id as an attribute in the main table and make it part of the GSI. Do note that to avoid conflicts you need to make the GSI SK a composite SK.
I would recommend using <region>#<unique-id>
This way you can query the GSI like,
where BEGINS_WITH ('X', SK)
Also, if any of your entry moves to a new region or a new entry is created in a region, it will automatically reflect in the GSI and your query results

Firebase Functions - Delete data without knowing the key

I am inserting data in Firebase Realtime Database in a table with the above structure. The key of the data is auto-generated based on push. After several such entries are created, sometime due to certain conditions I may need to delete one of the entries. At the point of deleting the entry, I may know some of the values of the node that I want to delete like createdAt and createdForPostID. But I will not know the key as it was auto-generated using push feature of firebase database. A combination of createdAt and createdForPostID makes a unique combination and only one such entry should exist in the database.
What would be the most efficient way to identify the entry without having to retrieve the entire node at OUTBOUND?
The reason I am using push is because Firebase claims it to be efficient and not subject to write conflicts. I also rely on the auto-sorting by date/time offered by push.
If no efficient way can be found, then I will generate my own key using date/time stamp. But I am hoping that this is a problem that someone has solved before and hence can guide me.
Any suggestions are welcome.
You'll need to run a query to find the items that match your conditions.
Since you seem to have multiple properties in your conditions, and the Firebase Database can only query on a single property, you'll need to combine the values into a single property as shown here.
Then you can run a query on that combined property and delete the items it returns:
var query = ref.orderByChild("createForPostID-createdAt").equalTo("20171229_124904-20171230_200343");
query.once("value", function(snapshot) {
snapshot.forEach(function(child) {
child.ref.remove();
})
Given Frank's answer I realised, I needed to create a unique property as per his suggestion because I will need it to do the future query. But then it seemed that I may be better off using that unique property as the key instead of using push
So it seems from an overall perspective, it might be more efficient to create your own key instead of push, if the app needs both create and delete functions. Reliance on push makes sense only if data is being created and deletion is not a big functionality of your app.
So, in conclusion, for Firebase data, the most efficient way to do both data create and delete needs creation of a unique key on your own.

Dynamodb write and fetch old row

I have a requirement where when I update in a row with primarykey and sortkey - I need to fetch all old rows with same primary key back. Can this be done in single request. Note:say my primary key is userid and sort key is activity type. When I update a row corresponding to one activitytype for a user , I need to fetch all rows of that user with all activity types. Is it possible?
TD;DR no
The longer answer is this is not supported by DynamoDB. You can't even always get all items for the same sort key in one request (it's only possible when the number of items is relatively small and the items themselves are not too big), much less issue a single request to update an item and execute a query with potentially many result pages, all in one go.
The underlying answer to your unasked question is DynamoDB doesn't support transactions (multiple operations executed atomically, without interference from other operations).

Retrieving Random Single Items in Dynamo

We are trying to get our heads wrapped around a design question, which is not really easy in any DB. We have 100,000 random items, (could be a lot more), (we are talking a truly random key, we'll use UUIDs,) and we want to hand them out one at a time. Order is not important. We are thinking that we'll create a dynamo table of the items, then delete them out of that table as they are assigned. We can do a conditional delete to make sure that we have not already given the item away. But, when trying to find an item in the first place, if we do a scan or a query with a limit of 1, will it always hit the same first available record? I'm wondering what the ramifications are. Dynamo will shard on the UUID. We are worried about everyhone trying to hit on the same record all the time. First one would of course get delete, then they could all hit on the second one, etc.
We could set up a memcache/redis instance in elastic cache, and keep a list of the available UUDS in there. We can do a random select of items from this using redis SPOP, which gets a random item and deletes it. We might have a problem where we could get out of sync between the two, but for the most part this would work.
Any thoughts on how to do this without the cache would be great. If dynamo does scans starting at different points, that would be dandy.
I have the same situation with you that have a set of million of UUID as key in DynamoDB and I need to random select some of them in a API call. For the performance issue and easy implementation. I did use Redis as you said.
add the UUID to a Set in Redis
when the call comes, SPOP a UUID from the set
with that UUID, del in DynamoDB
The performance of Scan operation is bad, should try to avoid it as best as you can.

Get an object from a bucket in riak without knowing its key

I am using a riak bucket to store a list of messages, using a UUID as the key and a json message as value. This is working fine.
What I need is an efficient way to get a single message from the bucket without knowing its key, at least in one of these two scenarios:
Get the last inserted object (this is my prefered approach).
Get a random object from the bucket (if the first alternative is not possible).
Is there any efficient way to achieve that?
I think one alternative could be to retrieve the keys in the bucket and then get the first one. But this means making two calls to riak, one to obtain all the keys (just to discard all but one) and a second one to obtain the object. It does not seem very efficient.
As Riak is a key-value store, the by far most efficient way to retrieve data is through the keys. Listing or retrieving all keys in a bucket, even if you only end up using the one returned first, is one of the least efficient operations you can perform as it causes Riak to scan ALL keys in the system (not just the bucket), and it is usually recommended NEVER to use this on a production system.
The most efficient way to get the last inserted object would probably be to store the id in a separate, known record in a different bucket. This would however require you to perform two writes on every insert and two reads for every read, but would do so in the most efficient way. You could possibly implement a post-commit hook (would have to be in Erlang as it is not currently not possible to write records using JavaScript functions) on the bucket containing messages to get the system to perform the update for you, which would remove the need for the last write.
If you write a lot of data to the bucket containing messages, you may want to adjust the separate bucket so that it does not allow multiple values and that the last value wins. This way you would reduce the risk of having lots of siblings created due to frequent updates to this single record across the system. This would always give you one of the last written records, but not necessarily the last one (especially if you frequently write messages to the database), as Riak does not support any type of atomicity and is an eventually consistent database.
You could also create one or more secondary indexes if you are using the leveldb backend, and use this to limit your scan to only recent records, which would be more efficient than a scann of all keys. You could then either select the most recent key or a random one through mapreduce, but this would be much less efficient than the previously described approach.
I can not think of any efficient way to retrieve a random record in a bucket from Riak unless you know the range of keys you have inserted and can decide randomly on the client which one to get. One way to do this would be to generate all keys in sequence rather than using a UUID, but that is naturally not a good idea in a highly concurrent distributed system.
1st task is pretty easy to implement:
Add post-commit hook that will write the last inserted key to some predefined key/bucket place
Get the key from that predefined key/bucket and issue a get query using them
It's still two operations but both are just gets that are fast. Plus additional overhead on hook but nothing too heavy either.
2nd scenario is also easy, but it is way too inefficient to be used practically:
Get all keys (extremely expensive operation)
Pick random
Issue get
I have come up with the same scenario. In My scenario I have to save the users. For that I required an auto increment Id. So what I did is, I placed the last inserted key in a separate bucket as like mentioned by "Christian Dahlqvist", every time I want to insert new record I fetch the last inserted key from that key bucket. Here we have only one value in that bucket with the key as "LastKey" which is always known to us. And I incremented the key based on the fetched key and again updated the key bucket. So always the key bucket contains the latest key in it.

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