Contributor Insights in DynamoDB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Contributor Insights with DynamoDB

📖 Scenario: You work for a small online bookstore. You want to track which authors contribute the most books to your inventory. This helps you understand popular authors and manage stock better.

🎯 Goal: Create a DynamoDB table to store book data, enable Contributor Insights to track the number of books per author, and query the insights to see top contributors.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a DynamoDB table named Books with BookID as the primary key.

Add items with BookID, Title, and Author attributes.

Enable Contributor Insights on the Author attribute to count books per author.

Write a query to retrieve the top authors by book count.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Tracking contributors helps businesses understand which authors or creators are most active and popular, aiding inventory and marketing decisions.

💼 Career

Many data analyst and database administrator roles require knowledge of monitoring and analyzing data contributions using tools like DynamoDB Contributor Insights.

1

Create the DynamoDB table and add book items

Create a DynamoDB table called Books with BookID as the primary key. Then add these three items exactly: {"BookID": "1", "Title": "The Great Gatsby", "Author": "F. Scott Fitzgerald"}, {"BookID": "2", "Title": "1984", "Author": "George Orwell"}, and {"BookID": "3", "Title": "Animal Farm", "Author": "George Orwell"}.

DynamoDB

# Create the Books table with BookID as primary key
# Add the three book items as specified

Need a hint?

Use aws dynamodb create-table to create the table and aws dynamodb put-item to add items.

2

Enable Contributor Insights on the Author attribute

Enable Contributor Insights on the Books table for the Author attribute to track the number of books contributed by each author.

DynamoDB

aws dynamodb create-table --table-name Books --attribute-definitions AttributeName=BookID,AttributeType=S --key-schema AttributeName=BookID,KeyType=HASH --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "1"}, "Title": {"S": "The Great Gatsby"}, "Author": {"S": "F. Scott Fitzgerald"}}'

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "2"}, "Title": {"S": "1984"}, "Author": {"S": "George Orwell"}}'

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "3"}, "Title": {"S": "Animal Farm"}, "Author": {"S": "George Orwell"}}'

# Enable Contributor Insights on Author attribute

Need a hint?

Use aws dynamodb update-contributor-insights with --contributor-insights-action ENABLE and specify the Author attribute.

3

Query Contributor Insights for top authors

Write a command to query Contributor Insights on the Books table to get the top authors by the number of books contributed.

DynamoDB

aws dynamodb create-table --table-name Books --attribute-definitions AttributeName=BookID,AttributeType=S --key-schema AttributeName=BookID,KeyType=HASH --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "1"}, "Title": {"S": "The Great Gatsby"}, "Author": {"S": "F. Scott Fitzgerald"}}'

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "2"}, "Title": {"S": "1984"}, "Author": {"S": "George Orwell"}}'

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "3"}, "Title": {"S": "Animal Farm"}, "Author": {"S": "George Orwell"}}'

aws dynamodb update-contributor-insights --table-name Books --contributor-insights-action ENABLE --contributor-insights-rule-list '[{"ContributorInsightsRuleName":"AuthorCount","ContributorInsightsRuleDefinition":{"KeySchema":[{"AttributeName":"Author","KeyType":"HASH"}]}}]'

# Query Contributor Insights for top authors

Need a hint?

Use aws dynamodb describe-contributor-insights to get the insights data.

4

Complete the setup by confirming Contributor Insights status

Add a command to confirm that Contributor Insights is enabled and running on the Books table.

DynamoDB

aws dynamodb create-table --table-name Books --attribute-definitions AttributeName=BookID,AttributeType=S --key-schema AttributeName=BookID,KeyType=HASH --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "1"}, "Title": {"S": "The Great Gatsby"}, "Author": {"S": "F. Scott Fitzgerald"}}'

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "2"}, "Title": {"S": "1984"}, "Author": {"S": "George Orwell"}}'

aws dynamodb put-item --table-name Books --item '{"BookID": {"S": "3"}, "Title": {"S": "Animal Farm"}, "Author": {"S": "George Orwell"}}'

aws dynamodb update-contributor-insights --table-name Books --contributor-insights-action ENABLE --contributor-insights-rule-list '[{"ContributorInsightsRuleName":"AuthorCount","ContributorInsightsRuleDefinition":{"KeySchema":[{"AttributeName":"Author","KeyType":"HASH"}]}}]'

aws dynamodb describe-contributor-insights --table-name Books

# Confirm Contributor Insights status

Need a hint?

Use aws dynamodb list-contributor-insights to check the status of Contributor Insights.