Developers Use Partition Key Sharding to Bypass DynamoDB Vector Search 100-Result Cap

DynamoDB added vector search support in August 2026, but limits each query to a maximum of 100 results (TopK=100), restricting use cases that require broad retrieval before reranking. A developer published a workaround using partition key sharding, splitting data across multiple shard groups using a SHA-256 hash of each item's ID. Queries are fired in parallel against all shards simultaneously, and results are merged and sorted by distance score on the application side. With five shards, this approach effectively raises the practical result ceiling to 500 per search. The method contrasts with Amazon S3 Vectors, which raised its own TopK limit from 100 to 10,000 in June 2026, highlighting an ongoing gap in DynamoDB's vector search capabilities.
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