Fine-Tuning Data Access

Inferring the Data Type

You can use the following properties to configure automatic data type detection, which is enabled by default.

TypeDetectionScheme: You can use this property to enable or disable automatic type detection based on the value specified in RowScanDepth.
RowScanDepth: This property determines the number of rows that will be scanned to determine column data types.
IgnoreTypes: The data types that should be ignored and resolve to varchar data types. By default, Date, Time, and Datetime types are ignored. This is because Amazon DynamoDB does not support them as types. Any filtering of these columns may be done only as their original varchar data type.

You can use the following properties to gain greater control over Amazon DynamoDB API features and the strategies the adapter uses to surface them:

GenerateSchemaFiles: This property enables you to persist table metadata in static schema files that are easy to customize, to change column data types, for example. You can set this property to "OnStart" to generate schema files for all tables in your database at connection. Or, you can generate schemas as you execute SELECT queries to tables. The resulting schemas are based on the connection properties you use to configure Automatic Schema Discovery.
UseSimpleNames: Amazon DynamoDB supports attribute names with special characters that many database-oriented tools do not support.

In addition, Amazon DynamoDB table names can include dots and dashes -- the adapter interprets dots within table names as hierarchy separators that enable you to drill down to nested fields, similar to XPath.

You can use this property to replace any nonalphanumeric character with an underscore.
SeparatorCharacter: You can use this property to more easily access nested fields when Querying Documents and Lists; specify the hierarchy separator with this property. By default, this character is the '.' (dot) character.