---
title: "How to download all available values from DynamoDB using pagination"
description: "How to use pagination to retrieve all DynamoDB values"
author: "Bartosz Mikulski"
author_bio: "Principal AI Engineer & MLOps Architect. I bridge the gap between \"it works in a notebook\" and \"it works for 200 million users.\""
author_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name
author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikulskibartosz/
author_github: https://github.com/mikulskibartosz
canonical_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name/download-all-values-from-dynamodb-using-pagination
---

A common problem I noticed in various applications was forgetting that DynamoDB supports pagination too. Somehow, when developers see more than ten results, they assume that they receive everything ;)

How do we retrieve all values from DynamoDB when performing a query?

We have to extract the `LastEvaluatedKey` from the response and use it as the `ExclusiveStartKey` in the subsequent query. In this article, I show how to do it when we use the `AwsDynamoDBHook` in Airflow:

```python
from boto3.dynamodb.conditions import Attr
from airflow.contrib.hooks.aws_dynamodb_hook import AwsDynamoDBHook

query_params = {
    'FilterExpression': Attr('some_field').eq('value'), 'ConsistentRead': True
}

hook = AwsDynamoDBHook('primary_key_name', 'table_name', 'aws_region')
connection = hook.get_conn()
table = connection.Table('table_name')

response = table.scan(**query_params)

entries = list()

for item in response['Items']:
    entries.append(item)

while 'LastEvaluatedKey' in response:
    response = table.scan(**query_params, ExclusiveStartKey=response['LastEvaluatedKey'])
    for item in response['Items']:
        entries.append(item)

output = iter(entries)
```