AWS Certified Developer Associate Practice Exam

In Amazon DynamoDB, a table can have up to five local secondary indexes (LSIs). LSIs allow you to create additional views of your data with different sort keys for the same partition key. This is particularly useful for query flexibility, as it enables you to query data in various ways without needing to manage multiple tables.

Each local secondary index must be defined when the table is created, as they cannot be added or removed later. It's crucial to keep in mind that all LSIs share the same partition key as the base table but can have different sort keys. This arrangement allows for efficient querying on different attributes but also limits the total number available to five per table to ensure manageable complexity and performance.

In contrast, global secondary indexes (GSIs) allow for more flexibility in terms of partition and sort keys and can be created in greater numbers than LSIs. However, that's beyond the scope of what local secondary indexes offer.

Understanding the capacity and limitations of DynamoDB indexes, including LSIs, is essential for optimizing data retrieval and application performance in AWS environments.