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AWS

Amazon Web Services from a database perspective: RDS and Aurora, databases on EC2, storage, networking, IAM, migration and keeping the bill under control.

Attaching your own CentOS 7 yum repository to AWS SSM

From some blogs I’ve written in the past you might already know that we are using AWS SSM to patch and maintain the complete EC2 and onprem instances at one of our customers. The previous posts about that topic are here: Avoiding patching madness by using AWS SSM Avoiding patching madness by using AWS SSM A simple Terraform script to… 

Publishing a PowerShell script to AWS Lambda

I’ve done some Lambda functions with Python in the past and it was quite easy to publish that to Lambda (by just uploading a zip file with all my code and dependencies). You might ask yourself why I want to do that with PowerShell but the reason is quite simple: There was a requirement at a customer to automatically collect… 

What is a serverless database?

By Franck Pachot . After reading the https://cloudwars.co/oracle/oracle-deal-8×8-larry-ellison-picks-amazons-pocket-again/ paper, I am writing some thoughts about how a database can be serverless and elastic. Of course, a database needs a server to process its data. Serverless doesn’t mean that there are no servers. Serverless as not waiting for server provisioning The first idea of “serverless” is about provisioning. In the past… 

AWS – RDS – SQL Server Native backups

Introduction RDS provide automatic backup feature. This feature will backup the entire RDS instance. As a DBA sometimes you need to backup individual database, they are many reason for that (legal, migration, replication,…). Unfortunately individual database backups are not available within the RDS instance. This post explains how you can enable the native database backup on RDS , as you… 

Oracle Standard Edition on AWS ☁ socket arithmetic

By Franck Pachot . Note that I’ve written previously about Oracle Standard Edition 2 licensing before but a few rules change. This is written in May 2020. TL;DR: 4 vCPU count for 1 socket and 2 sockets count for 1 server wherever hyper-threading is enabled or not. The SE2 rules I think the Standard Edition rules are quite clear now:… 

The myth of NoSQL (vs. RDBMS) agility: adding attributes

By Franck Pachot . There are good reasons for NoSQL and semi-structured databases. And there are also many mistakes and myths. If people move from RDBMS to NoSQL because of wrong reasons, they will have a bad experience and this finally deserves NoSQL reputation. Those myths were settled by some database newbies who didn’t learn SQL and relational databases. And,… 

AWS Aurora vs. RDS PostgreSQL on frequent commits

This post is the second part of https://www.dbi-services.com/blog/aws-aurora-xactsync-batch-commit/ where I’ve run row-by-row inserts on AWS Aurora with different size of intermediate commit. Without surprise the commit-each-row anti-pattern has a negative effect on performance. And I mentioned that this is even worse in Aurora where the session process sends directly the WAL to the network storage and waits, at commit, that… 

AWS Aurora IO:XactSync is not a PostgreSQL wait event

By Franck Pachot . In AWS RDS you can run two flavors of the PostgreSQL managed service: the real PostgreSQL engine, compiled from the community sources, and running on EBS storage mounted by the database EC2 instance, and the Aurora which is proprietary and AWS Cloud only, where the upper layer has been taken from the community PostgreSQL. The storage… 

AWS Certified Database Specialty (DBS-C01)

Here is my feedback after preparing and passing the AWS Database Specialty certification. There are tips about the exam but also some thoughts that came to my mind during the preparation when I had to mind-shift from a multi-purpose database system to purpose-built database services. Exam Availability This exam was in beta between last December/January and then was planned for… 

AWS RDS for PostgreSQL – 4 – Changing parameters

If you followed that last posts about DB Parameter Groups, Subnet Groups and Setting up the RDS instance you should have a running RDS instance. You should also be aware that changing parameters can not be done like you usually do it but you need to do that by changing the DB parameter groups. In this post we’ll look at… 

AWS RDS for PostgreSQL – 2 – Subnet groups

In the last post we had a look at DB Parameter Groups when it comes to AWS RDS for PostgreSQL. This is one of the first things you should think about. But even before you think about PostgreSQL parameters you need to configure the networks your database instances shall be running in. In real life this is done by one…