---
title: "Local vs Global Indexes in Partitioned Databases"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/local-vs-global-indexes-in-partitioned-databases-h29syfspy
source_url: https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/how-indexes-work-on-partitioned-and-sharded-data
type: article
source: "Arpit Bhayani"
published: 2026-05-31T07:54:39.388Z
updated: 2026-05-31T09:09:58.927Z
tags: ["distributed-systems", "aws-dynamodb"]
reading_time: 6
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Local vs Global Indexes in Partitioned Databases

**[Arpit Bhayani](https://daily.dev/sources/arpit-bhayani)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A deep dive into indexing strategies for partitioned (sharded) databases, comparing Local Secondary Indexes and Global Secondary Indexes. Local indexes are partition-scoped, making writes cheap but cross-partition queries expensive. Global indexes re-partition data on a different key, enabling efficient global reads but introducing costly synchronous writes or eventual consistency when updated asynchronously. AWS DynamoDB is used as a real-world example supporting both approaches.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/how-indexes-work-on-partitioned-and-sharded-data>

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---

Tags: [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems), [#aws-dynamodb](https://daily.dev/tags/aws-dynamodb)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/local-vs-global-indexes-in-partitioned-databases-h29syfspy)