title: nosql/dynamodb hash and range use case
body: <p>It's my first time using a NoSQL database so I'm really confused. I'd really appreciate any help I can get.</p>
  
  <p>I want to store data comprising announcements in my table. Essentially, each announcement has an ID, a date, and a text. </p>
  
  <p>So for example, an announcement might have ID of 1, date of 2014/02/26, and text of "This is a sample announcement". Newer announcements always have a greater ID value than older announcements, since they are added to the table later.</p>
  
  <p>There are two types of queries I want to run on this table:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>I want to retrieve the text of the announcements sorted in order of date.</li>
  <li>I want to retrieve the text and dates of the x most recent announcements (say, the 3 most recent announcements).</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>So I've set up the table with the following attributes:
  ID (number) as primary key, and
  date (string) as range</p>
  
  <p>Is this appropriate for what my use cases? And if so, what kind of query/reads/requests/scans/whatever (I'm really confused about the terminology here too) should I be running to accomplish the two types of queries I want to make?</p>
  
  <p>Any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks!</p>