Using millisecond timestamp as the global secondary index in DynamodDb for range queries?

Question

We have a Dynamodb table Events with about 50 million records that look like this:

{
 "id": "1yp3Or0KrPUBIC",
 "event_time": 1632934672534,
 "attr1" : 1,
 "attr2" : 2,
 "attr3" : 3,
 ...
 "attrN" : N,
}

The Partition Key=id and there is no Sort Key. There can be a variable number of attributes other than id (globally unique) and event_time, which are required.

This setup works fine for fetching by id but now we'd like to efficiently query against event_time and pull ALL attributes for records that match within that range (could be a million or two items). The criteria would be equal to something like WHERE event_date between 1632934671000 and 1632934672000, for example.

Without changing any existing data or transforming it through an external process, is it possible to create a Global Secondary Index using event_date and projecting ALL attributes that could allow a range query? By my understanding of DynamoDB this isn't possible but maybe there's another configuration I'm overlooking.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It seems like one can create a global secondary index at any point.

Below is an excerpt from the Managing Global Secondary Indexes documentation which can be found here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/GSI.OnlineOps.html

To add a global secondary index to an existing table, use the UpdateTable operation with the GlobalSecondaryIndexUpdates parameter.