News

Amazon Relational Database Service Gets Multiple Updates

• By David Ramel
• 10/26/2018

The Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud recently received multiple updates, gaining support for newer versions of MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and more.

Amazon RDS lets customers use relational databases in the cloud while taking care of administration functions like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It supports six RDBMS offerings: Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.

This week AWS announced version upgrades for several of those databases, along with other updates:

• Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB 10.3, the latest major version release of the open source database from the original developers of MySQL. "MariaDB 10.3 offers improved Oracle compatibility, support for querying historical states of the database, features that increase flexibility for developers and DBAs, and improved manageability," the company said.
• Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports MySQL Community Edition major version 8.0. "MySQL 8.0 is the latest major version release and offers new query functionality and enhancements for better performance, reliability, security, manageability, and international and mobile support," AWS said. Earlier this month, AWS announced the MySQL service gained support for several minor versions in the 5.x series. It also announced the service supports global transaction identifiers.
• Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports database storage size up to 32TiB. "The 32TiB storage size supports larger transactional databases, it also allows you to consolidate database shards into a single database instance, which will simplify your application code and reduce database administration work," AWS said.
• PostgreSQL 11 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment. That environment lets data developers test beta, release candidate and early production versions of database engine software on RDS. PostgreSQL 11 was just released on Oct. 18. AWS yesterday announced customers can now "test the early production version of PostgreSQL 11 on Amazon RDS including 40+ extensions like PostGIS and support for hash partitioning. PostgreSQL 11 can now be deployed for development and performance testing in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment without the hassle of installing, provisioning, and managing the database."

AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr detailed many of these announcements and more in an Oct. 23 blog post.

Additional news shared by Barr includes:

• Console Update -- The RDS Console has a fresh, new look. "You can see an overview of your RDS resources at a glance, create a new database, access documentation, and more, all from the home page," Barr said.
• RDS Recommendations -- Customers can now get recommendations to help configure database instances following AWS best practices.
• Performance Insights for MySQL -- Customers can peer deep inside of MySQL and understand more about how queries are processed.
• M5 Instances –- Customers can now use MySQL and MariaDB on M5 instances.

Barr said all the new features, engines and instance types are available now.