Serverless Developer Guide
For rapid local development, modeling, and testing, AWS provides a downloadable version of 
DynamoDB that you can run on your computer. The local database instance provides the same API 
as the cloud-based service.
Fundamentals
In DynamoDB, tables, items, and attributes are the core components. Data items stored in tables 
are identiﬁed with a primary key, which can be a simple partition hash key or a composite of a 
partition key and a sort key. Although these terms may sound familiar, we will deﬁne all of them to 
clarify how similar and diﬀerent they are from traditional SQL database terms.
Core Components
A table is a collection of items, and each item is a collection of attributes.
Fundamentals 74