Amazon Aurora is a

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

service developed and offered by

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

beginning in October 2014. Aurora is available as part of the

Amazon Relational Database Service Amazon Relational Database Service (or Amazon RDS) is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational data ...

(RDS).

History

Aurora offered

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

compatible service upon its release in 2014. It added

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

compatibility in October 2017. In August 2017, Aurora Fast Cloning (

copy-on-write Copy-on-write (COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing or shadowing, is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources. If a resource is dupl ...

) feature was added allowing customers to create copies of their databases. In May 2018, Aurora Backtrack was added which allows developers to rewind database clusters without creating a new one. It became possible to stop and start Aurora Clusters in September 2018. In August 2018, Amazon began to offer a

serverless Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still ...

version. In 2019 the developers of Aurora won the

SIGMOD SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases. The annual ACM SIGMOD Conference, which began in 1975, is considered one of ...

Systems Award for fundamentally redesigning relational database storage for cloud environments.

Features

Aurora automatically allocates database storage space in 10-gigabyte increments, as needed, up to a maximum of 128

terabyte The byte is a units of information, unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character (computing), character of text in a computer and for this ...

s. Aurora offers automatic, six-way replication of those chunks across three Availability Zones for improved availability and

fault-tolerance Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

. Aurora provides users with performance metrics, such as

query throughput In computer science, query throughput (QthD) is a measurement used to determine the performance of a database system. The throughput metric is a classical throughput measure characterizing the ability of the system to support a multi-user Multi ...

and latency. It provides fast database cloning. Aurora Multi-Master allows creation of multiple read-write instances in an Aurora database across multiple Availability Zones, which enables uptime-sensitive applications to achieve continuous write availability through instance failure.

MySQL compatibility

Amazon designed Aurora to be compatible with MySQL, meaning that tools for querying or managing MySQL databases (such as the command-line client and the

MySQL Workbench MySQL Workbench is a visual database design tool that integrates SQL development, administration, database design, creation and maintenance into a single integrated development environment for the MySQL database system. It is the successor t ...

graphical user-interface) can be used. As of December 2021, Amazon Aurora is compatible with MySQL 5.6, 5.7, and 8.0. It supports

InnoDB InnoDB is a database engine, storage engine for the database management system MySQL and MariaDB. Since the release of MySQL 5.5.5 in 2010, it replaced MyISAM as MySQL's default table type. It provides the standard ACID-compliant Database transact ...

as a storage engine.

Performance

Amazon claims fivefold performance improvements on benchmarking tests over MySQL on the same hardware, due to "tightly integrating the database engine with an

SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is ...

-based virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads, reducing writes to the storage system, minimizing

lock contention In computer science, a lock or mutex (from mutual exclusion) is a synchronization primitive: a mechanism that enforces limits on access to a resource when there are many threads of execution. A lock is designed to enforce a mutual exclusion concu ...

and eliminating delays created by database process threads". Other independent tests have shown that Aurora performs better than competing technologies on some, but not all, combinations of workload and instance type.

References

External links

Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases
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'17 ( ACM digital library) * 2014 software

Aurora An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae), also commonly known as the polar lights, is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions (around the Arctic and Antarctic). Auroras display dynamic patterns of bri ...