Loading Data From DynamoDB Into Amazon Redshift

DynamoDB is an exceptional key-value store with great performance characteristics. But it's quite limited when it comes to data analysis and business intelligence queries.

Before you can copy data from a DynamoDB table, you need to create the corresponding table in Redshift.

The following copy command performs the copy (this will count against your DynamoDB's read capacity):

copy users from 'dynamodb://my-users' 
     credentials 'aws_access_key_id=<Your-Access-Key-ID>;aws_secret_access_key=<Your-Secret-Access-Key>' 
     readratio 50;

where users is the destination table in Redshift, my-users is the corresponding DynamoDB table and readratio is how much of the provisioned read capacity the copy operation can consume.

Caveats

1. DynamoDB does not support NULL values, so empty strings, blank values will have to be specially handled in Redshift.
2. The DynamoDB attributes are case-insensitively matched to the Redshift table's columns. If there are two columns on Redshift that can match case-insensitively to the DynamoDB attributes, the copy command will fail.
3. The data types on Redshift and Dynamo do not match one-to-one. For example, DynamoDB's binary and set data types are not supported.

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