Yeah, it's kind of bogus. While I would say, "just go nuts with your lookup tables", you have to manage your quota for those additional lookup tables, so then i

Yeah, it's kind of bogus. While I would say, "just go nuts with your lookup tables", you have to manage your quota for those additional lookup tables, so then instead of just figuring out how much quota to buy for 1 table you now have to do it for 1+X tables. And since you never want to run out of quota you end up paying for a lot more quota than you are using. Luckily in my app I only have 1 lookup I ever want to do (find your account based on your social network id, so you can restore your account after reinstalling the app + connecting to facebook), so just maintaining this single lookup table is not that bad. If you really need to query on a bunch of other fields then maybe you should maintain a single table in RDS (MySql) and just use it for looking up the DynamoDb primary key. I think that is what I would do.