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DynamoDB does not support aggregation queries, but we need it for a use case; let’s build a real-time DDB aggregation today…
Deliveroo, a food delivery startup had a similar problem. On their app, people can mark a restaurant as “favorite” and now they wanted to render restaurants ordered by most favorite first.
We have a favorites
table in which we store users and their favorite restaurants. The table has restaurant_id_user_id
as their primary key and created_at
, and user_id
, as other attributes.
With the above data model, getting if a user marked a restaurant as a favorite is an O(1) lookup and so are the marking and unmarking activites.
With this data model, it becomes near impossible to get restaurants ordered by their favorite count, purely because DynamoDB does not support aggregations.
Maintain a separate table having aggregated favorite count as one of the attributes and use it to get tables ordered by favorite count.
Introducing a new table aggregated_favourites
having the following schema
rastaurant_id
as the primary keytime_window
as the sort keyfavourite_count
, updated_at
as other attributes.We set up a DynamoDB stream that would contain all the events happening on the favorites
table. This stream will be consumed by an AWS lambda function.
The lambda function will transactional do count++
upon every creation and count--
on deletion.
This way, we maintain the aggregated favorite count for each restaurant in near-realtime without doing any fancy code changes.
Here's the video ⤵
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Arpit's Newsletter read by 38000+ engineers
Weekly essays on real-world system design, distributed systems, or a deep dive into some super-clever algorithm.