There are two types of searches you can do on DynamoDB; Scan and Query. Scan retrieves all the records from a table. Query makes use of the primary key to efficiently retrieve a set of records. Both allow you to have optional consistency, pagination, filters, conditions, and to choose the attributes to be returned. Generally speaking, Scan is useful if you want to retrieve all of the data, or the data across many different primary keys, and Query should be used when you have a primary key and want to retrieve all, or a filtered version of, the associated records.