I wouldn't be surprised if they roll out hash-key-less lookup at some point. This announcement shows they realize that the inclusion of a feature which _could_

I wouldn't be surprised if they roll out hash-key-less lookup at some point. This announcement shows they realize that the inclusion of a feature which _could_ be built on the initial primitives can reduce barriers to adoption. IMHO the challenge is to communicate the increased cost when making use of these enhanced features. One of the amazing things about DynamoDB is that AWS have learned the pain points of DBaaS from SimpleDB and structured the features and pricing of DDB to be more "true" to the limitations of distributed datastores. So, while they can likely introduce hash-key-less lookup, they have to balance the increased adoption with the downside of unhappy/confused customers that expected it to be free. As it stands now, customers need to build that capability themselves, which is instructive in terms of the costs to implement it.