AWS Adds Filtered Export to Amazon DynamoDB

AWS has introduced filtered export for Amazon DynamoDB, allowing users to export only the items and attributes they need without consuming table capacity. This feature builds on existing incremental export capabilities, which write every item that changed in a time window.

The new Filtered Export feature uses the same syntax as Query and Scan operations, with five fields: KeyConditionExpression, FilterExpression, ProjectionExpression, ExpressionAttributeNames, and ExpressionAttributeValues. These expressions can be used to select specific partitions, items, or attributes for export.

AWS provides an example of using filtered export to recover a single tenant's data after a bad deployment. The company Field Ops uses DynamoDB to manage work orders for its customer companies. When a defect caused incorrect billing, the team needed to retrieve the affected tenant's items as they were before the incident. Using filtered export, they were able to write only the tenant's items that changed between 14:00 and 14:45 UTC on September 10.