Query and scan best practices

Query and scan, as we know, are heavy operations and mostly deal with read capacity units provisioned for the particular table. It is very important to take care of even distribution of load considering that the read capacity units get utilized properly. Here are some best practices that you should follow in order to avoid getting exceptions about exceeding provisioned throughput.

Maintaining even read activity

We know that a scan operation fetches 1 MB of data for a single request per page. We also know that an eventually consistent read operation consumes two 4 KB read capacity units per second. This means that a single scan operation costs (1 MB / 4 KB items / two eventually consistent reads) = 128 reads, which would be quite high if you have set your provisioned throughput very low. This sudden burst of data would cause throttling of the provisioned throughput for the given table. Also, meanwhile, if you get a very important request, that request would get...