4.3: Scan

A Scan will grab everything in a table. If you have a large table, this will be infeasible in a single request, so it will paginate. Your first request in a Scan call will read a bunch of data and send it back to you, along with a pagination key. You’ll need to make another call, using the pagination key to indicate to DynamoDB where you left off.

The times you may consider using the Scan operation are:

1: When you have a very small table

2: When you’re exporting all data from your table to a different system

3: In exceptional situations, where you have specifically modeled a sparse secondary index in a way that expects a scan.