# Bean & Bark: learn DynamoDB by doing

Meet **Bean & Bark** — a coffee roaster whose entire store lives in one DynamoDB table. You're the new hire. Across four short chapters a real problem lands on your desk each time, and you solve it with a query — learning DynamoDB by *doing*, on a dataset with actual stories hidden in it.

This isn't a syllabus of features. Each chapter is a *situation*: the founder needs an answer before a meeting, a region's revenue has slipped, a cleanup has to run against live data, a standing report needs its own key. You write the query, and the studio shows you exactly what it costs and what it would change — the same disclosure you'd rely on for real work.

Everything here runs against **your own DynamoDB** — a local one on your laptop is ideal: free, offline, nothing to provision. No AWS account required to follow along. Start at the top and use the **Next** button, or jump to the job you have right now:

- **[Answer the founder](https://www.kanject.com/docs/dynostudio-bean-bark-first-query/)** — Find one customer’s orders in a single cheap read — and learn to tell a Query from a Scan by watching what each one costs.
- **[Break down a drop](https://www.kanject.com/docs/dynostudio-bean-bark-region-revenue/)** — Explain a 12% revenue dip with SUM and GROUP BY, and feel what a cross-cutting business question actually costs.
- **[Change prod without fear](https://www.kanject.com/docs/dynostudio-bean-bark-safe-writes/)** — Edit production data behind a preview and a backup, so a wrong WHERE clause is a shrug on screen, not lost data.
- **[Index a new question](https://www.kanject.com/docs/dynostudio-bean-bark-gsi/)** — When the partition key can’t answer a standing question — every order in the fulfillment queue — add a GSI and turn a whole-table Scan into a cheap Query.

> **What you’ll need:** DynoStudio, and a DynamoDB to point it at. Quickest start: **download the Bean & Bark sample below and import it into DynoStudio**. To run the queries against your own copy, DynamoDB Local on your machine is perfect for the whole series — offline, nothing to provision. One heads-up: the sample is a faithful **~5,900-item slice** of the ~240,000-order store the lessons describe — the *answers* match exactly, but the raw item counts you see in the studio will be smaller.

**Set up**

- [Bean & Bark sample dataset](/datasets/bean-and-bark/bean-and-bark.ddb.json) — The seed for this whole series — ~5,900 items in DynamoDB-JSON. Import it into DynoStudio, or load it into DynamoDB Local; the README and one-command seed script sit alongside it under /datasets/bean-and-bark/.
- [Run DynamoDB Local](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/DynamoDBLocal.html) — AWS docs: run DynamoDB on your own machine — free, offline, nothing to provision.

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_Source: https://www.kanject.com/docs/dynostudio-bean-bark/ · Kanject Docs_