After struggling for days assuming Limit in dynamoDB query works just the way it does in RDBMS I'd like to post this out here for clarity, Limit parameter in query actually denotes how many records to match and not necessarily limit of number records to return. You can find aws documentation explaining it here. Also, just in case anyone is wondering, the order of the query execution is, it will query your data based on PK/SK upto 1MB first then apply limit that you supplied as part of the query then apply whatever filter you may have provided.