How to query all items of a specific type?

Question

I have a dynamo table, and have two main types of items: groups and users. I am using groupIds and userIds as partition keys, and userIds and groupIds as sort keys. In this way I am able to map many to many relationships. So querying a userId I can get all of the users groups, and querying a group I can get all of the users in that group.

I'm wondering if there is a way to architect it in such a way where I can easily query all groups without performing a scan?

My thought is to have a partition key that is just something like "groups" and a sort key of groupIds. Is this a proper approach?

Answer

What do you mean by "query all groups"? Get a list of group names? I'm going to assume so with my answer here.

Within each item collection for a group do you have an item which holds the metadata about that group? So the other items in the item collection are the users, but the one item is about the group itself? Having the group name and such. I'm guessing yes.

Setup a GSI having a PK of whatever attribute stores the group name. Then with a scan of the GSI you can get all the group metadata items and nothing else (because nothing else is in the GSI), so it's efficient. Project into the GSI whatever attributes are needed for that "query all groups" query.

Again, I'm making a lot of assumptions here on what you really intend.

How to query all items of a specific type?

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