What's the difference between BatchGetItem and Query in DynamoDB?

I've been going through AWS DynamoDB docs and, for the life of me, cannot figure out what's the core difference between batchGetItem() and Query(). Both retrieve items based on primary keys from tables and indexes. The only difference is in the size of the items retrieved but that doesn't seem like a ground breaking difference. Both also support conditional updates.

In what cases should I use batchGetItem over Query and vice-versa?

There’s an important distinction that is missing from the other answers:

• Query requires a partition key
• BatchGetItems requires a primary key

Query is only useful if the items you want to get happen to share a partition (hash) key, and you must provide this value. Furthermore, you have to provide the exact value; you can’t do any partial matching against the partition key. From there you can specify an additional (and potentially partial/conditional) value for the sort key to reduce the amount of data read, and further reduce the output with a FilterExpression. This is great, but it has the big limitation that you can’t get data that lives outside a single partition.

BatchGetItems is the flip side of this. You can get data across many partitions (and even across multiple tables), but you have to know the full and exact primary key: that is, both the partition (hash) key and any sort (range). It’s literally like calling GetItem multiple times in a single operation. You don’t have the partial-searching and filtering options of Query, but you’re not limited to a single partition either.

As per the official documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/WorkingWithTables.html#CapacityUnitCalculations

For BatchGetItem, each item in the batch is read separately, so DynamoDB first rounds up the size of each item to the next 4 KB and then calculates the total size. The result is not necessarily the same as the total size of all the items. For example, if BatchGetItem reads a 1.5 KB item and a 6.5 KB item, DynamoDB will calculate the size as 12 KB (4 KB + 8 KB), not 8 KB (1.5 KB + 6.5 KB).

For Query, all items returned are treated as a single read operation. As a result, DynamoDB computes the total size of all items and then rounds up to the next 4 KB boundary. For example, suppose your query returns 10 items whose combined size is 40.8 KB. DynamoDB rounds the item size for the operation to 44 KB. If a query returns 1500 items of 64 bytes each, the cumulative size is 96 KB.

You should use BatchGetItem if you need to retrieve many items with little HTTP overhead when compared to GetItem.

A BatchGetItem costs the same as calling GetItem for each individual item. However, it can be faster since you are making fewer network requests.