Populate DynamoDB with BatchWriteItem & TypeScript

June 9, 2022

2 min read

Populate DynamoDB with BatchWriteItem & TypeScript
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Let's populate a DynamoDB table using BatchWriteItem.

I have a list of coupon codes for my product, and I want to move them into a DynamoDB table.

import uuid from "uuid/v4"

import { tableName } from "../src/shared/db/tableName"
import { documentClient } from "../src/shared/db"

const batchWriteItemMax = 25

const appSumoCodesNumber = 10000

const populateAppSumoCodes = async () => {
  const codes = Array.from({ length: appSumoCodesNumber }, () => uuid())
  const items = codes.map((id) => ({ id }))

  const itemsBatchesNumber = Math.ceil(items.length / batchWriteItemMax)
  await Promise.all(
    Array.from({ length: itemsBatchesNumber }, (_, i) => i).map(
      async (batchIndex) => {
        const batchItems = items.slice(
          batchWriteItemMax * batchIndex,
          batchWriteItemMax * (batchIndex + 1)
        )

        await documentClient
          .batchWrite({
            RequestItems: {
              [tableName.appSumoCodes]: batchItems.map((Item) => ({
                PutRequest: {
                  Item,
                },
              })),
            },
          })
          .promise()
      }
    )
  )
}

populateAppSumoCodes()

First, I convert them into a list of items.

We can't just upload all of them at once. DynamoDB allows inserting a maximum of 25 items at once.

We need to calculate how many batches we should have. For example, if there are 60 items, we'll insert 3 batches.

After that, we create an array with the length of itemsBatchesNumber, and use Promise.all to iterate over it.

To populate the table, we slice a batch from a list of items and pass it to the batchWrite method of DynamoDB documentClient.

Now let's set environment variables and run the migration with ts-node.