As you noticed, DynamoDB indeed does not have an option to sort items "globally". In other words, there is no way to Scan the database in sorted partition-key order. You can only sort items inside one partition, sorted by the "sort key".
When you have a small amount of data, you can indeed do what you said: Have a single partition with everything in this partition. However it's not clear how practical this approach becomes as your single partition grows - to gigabytes or terabytes, and how well DynamoDB can load-balance when you have just a single partition (I never saw any DynamoDB documentation which answer this question).
So another option is not to have a single partition but rather have a number of them. For example, consider that you want to sort items by date. Now insead of having a single partition, have a partition per month, i.e., the partition key is the month number. Now, if you want to sort everything within a month, you can do it directly, but if you want to get a sorted list of a full year, you need to Query twelve partitions, in order, getting a sorted list in each one and combining it to a sorted list for the full year. So-called time-series databases are often modeled this way.
