Amazon DynamoDB is a schemaless database that provides high performance, availability, and scalability. These features are not necessarily incompatible with a standards-compliant query language like SQL-92. In this section we will show various schemes that the adapter offers to bridge the gap with relational SQL and a document database.

The adapter models the schemaless Amazon DynamoDB tables into relational tables and translates SQL queries into Amazon DynamoDB queries to get the requested data. The adapter offers two ways, Automatic Schema Discovery and Custom Schema Definitions, to model Amazon DynamoDB tables as relational tables.

The Automatic Schema Discovery scheme automatically finds the data types in a Amazon DynamoDB table by scanning a configured number of rows of the table. You can use RowScanDepth, FlattenArrays, and FlattenObjects to control the relational representation of the tables in Amazon DynamoDB.

Optionally, you can use Custom Schema Definitions to project your chosen relational structure on top of a Amazon DynamoDB table. This allows you to define your chosen column names, their data types, and the location of their values in the Amazon DynamoDB table.