AWS DATABASES

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Relational Databases
Relational databases are what most of us ar all used to. They have been around since the 70’s.
Think of a traditional spreadsheet;

• Database
• Tables
• Row
• Fields

Eg;

There are different relational databases on AWS namely;

• MS SQL Server
• Oracle
• MySQL Server
• PostgreSQL
• Aurora
• MariaDB

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Relational Database Services (RDS) Features;
RDS has two key features;

• Multi-AZ – For Disaster Recovery

• Read Replicas – For Performance.

Non-Relational Databases are as follows;

• Collection = Table
• Document = Row
• Key Value Pairs = Fields

Example of a non relational database;

{

“_id” : “51262c865caasdsadfbe0545435,
“firstname” : ”John”,
“surname” : “Smith”,
“Age” : “23”,
“address” : [

{“street”: “21 Jump Street”,

“suburb” : “Richmond”}
]
}

Relational Database Vs Non-Relational Database

We can have any number of rows and fields in non-relational database, but in relational
database, we need to keep some consistency in data.

DynamoDB (No SQL)

It is amazon’s No SQL solution. Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service
for all applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully
managed database and supports both document and key-value data models. Its flexible data
model and reliable performance make it a great fit for mobile, web, gaming, ad-tech, IoT, and
many other applications.

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The basics of DynamoDB are as follows;

• Stored on SSD Storage

• Spread across 3 geographically distinct data centers.
• Eventual consistent Reads (Default)
Consistency across all copies of data is usually reached within a second. Repeating a
read after a short time should return the updated data. (Best Read Performance)
• Strongly Consistent Reads.
A strongly consistent read returns a result that reflects all writes that received a
successful response prior to the read

Data Warehousing
Used for business intelligence. Tools like Cognos, Jaspersoft, SQL Server Reporting Services,
Oracle Hyperion, SAP NetWeaver.
Data warehousing databases use different type of architecture both from a database
perspective and infrastructure layer.
Amazon’s Data Warehouse Solution is called Redshift. (Mainly for OLAP)
Used to pull in very large and complex data sets. Usually used by management to do queries on
data (such as current performance vs targets etc)

OLTP vs OLAP
Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) differs from OLAP Online Analytics Processing (OLAP) in
terms of the types of queries you will run.
OLTP Example:
Order number 212002
Pulls up a row of data such as Name, Data, Address to Deliver to, Delivery Status etc.

OLAP Transaction Example:

Net profit for EMEA and pacific for the Digital Radio Product. Pulls in large numbers of records.
Sum of Radios Sold in EMEA
Sum of Radios Sold in Pacific
Unit Cost of Radio in each region
Sales price of each radio
Sales price – unit cost

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Additional Points;
• RDS runs on virtual machines
• You cannot log in to these operating systems however.
• Patching of the RDS Operating System and DB is Amazon’s responsibility
• RDS is NOT Serverless
• Aurora Serverless IS Serverless

RDS – Back Ups, Multi-AZ & Read Replicas

There are two different types of Backups for RDS:
• Automated Backups
Automated Backups allow you to recover your database to any point in time within a
“retention period”. The retention period can be between one and 35 days. Automated
Backups will take a full daily snapshot and will also store transaction logs throughout the
day. When you do a recover, AWS will first choose the most recent daily back up, and
then apply transaction logs relevant to that day. This allows you to do a point in time
recovery down to a second, within the retention period.

Automated Backups are enabled by default. The backup data is stored in S3 and you get
free storage space equal to the size of your database. So If you have an RDS Instance of
10Gb, you will get 10Gb worth of storage.
Backups are taken within a defined window. During the backup window, storage I/O
may be suspended while your data is being backed up and you may experience elevated
latency.

• Database Snapshots
DB Snapshots are done manually (ie they are user initiated.) They are stored even after
you delete the original RDS instance, unlike automated backups.

Restoring Backups
Whenever you restore either an Automatic Backup or a manual Snapshot, the restored version
of the database will be a new RDS instance with a new DNS endpoint.

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Encryption At Rest
Encryption at rest is supported for MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MariaDB & Aurora.
Encryption is done using the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Service. Once your RDS
instance is encrypted, the data stored at rest in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are tis
automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots.

Multi-AZ
Multi-AZ allows you to have an exact copy of your production database in another Availability
Zone. AWS handles the replication for you, so when your production database is written to, this
write will automatically be synchronized to the stand by database. It is used for DR.

In the event of planned database maintenance, DB Instance failure, or an Availability Zone

failure, Amazon RDS will automatically failover to the standby so that database operations can
resume quickly without administrative intervention.
Multi-AZ is available for the following databases
• SQL Server
• Oracle
• MySQL Server
• PostgreSQL
• MariaDB

Read Replica
Read replicas allow you to have a read-only copy of your production database. This is achieved
by suing Asynchronous replication from the primary RDS instance to the read replica. You use
read replicas primarily for very read-heavy database workloads.

• It is used for scaling, not for DR!

• Must have automatic backups turned on in order to deploy a read replica.
• You can have up to 5 read replica copies for any database.
• You can have read replicas of read replicas (but watch out for latency.)
• Each read replica will have its own DNS end point.
• You can have read replicas that have Multi-AZ.
• You can create read replicas of Multi-AZ source databases.
• Read replicas can be promoted to be their own databases. This breaks the replication.
• You can have a read replica in a second region.

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Read Replicas are available for the following databases
• MySQL Server
• PostgreSQL
• MariaDB
• Oracle
• Aurora

Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service
in the cloud. Customers can start small for just $0.25 per hour with no commitments or upfront
costs and scale to a petabyte or more for $1,000 per terabyte per year, less than a tenth of
most other data warehousing solutions.

• It is used for Business Intelligence

• Enabled by default with 1 day retention period.
• Maximum retention period is 35 days.
• Redshift always attempts to maintain at least 3 copies of your data (the original &
replica on the compute nodes and a backup in Amazon S3).
• Redshift can also asynchronously replicate your snapshots to S3 in another region for
disaster recovery.
Advanced Compression: - Columnar data stores can be compressed much more than row-based
data stores because similar data is stored sequentially on disk. Amazon Redshift employs
multiple compression techniques and can often achieve significant compression relative to
traditional relational data stores. In addition, Amazon Redshift doesn’t require indexes or
materialized views, and so uses less space than traditional relational database systems. When
loading data into an empty table, Amazon Redshift automatically samples your data and selects
the most appropriate compression scheme.
Massively Parallel Processing (MPP): Amazon Redshift automatically distributes data and query
load across all nodes. Amazon Redshift makes it easy to add nodes to your data warehouse and
enables you to maintain fast query performance as your data warehouse grows.

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Redshift is priced as follows;
• Compute Node Hours (Total number of hours you run across all your compute nodes for
the billing period. You are billed for 1 unit per node per hour, so a 3-node data
warehouse cluster running persistently for an entire month would incur 2,160 instance
hours. You will not be charged for leader node hours; only compute nodes will incur
charges.)
• Backup
• Data Transfer (Only within a VPC, not outside it)

Security Considerations (Redshift):

• Encrypted in transit using SSL
• Encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption
• By default RedShift takes care of key management.
o Manage your own keys through HSM
o AWS Key Management Service.

Redshift Availability
• Currently only available in 1 AZ
• Can restore snapshots to new AZs in the event of an outage.

AURORA

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and
availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source
databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL at a price point
one tenth that of a commercial database while delivering similar performance and availability.

• It start with 10GB, scales in 10GB increments to 64TB (Storage Autoscaling)

• Compute resources can scale up to 32vCPUs and 244GB of Memory

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 • 2 copies of your data is contained in each availability zone, with minimum of 3 availability zones.
6 copies of your data.

Scaling Aurora
• Aurora is designed to transparently handle the loss of up to 2 copies of data without affecting
database write availability and up to three copies without affecting read availability.
• Aurora storage is also self-healing. Data blocks and disks are continuously scanned for errors and
repaired automatically.

Two Types of Aurora Replicas are available;

• Aurora Replicas (currently 15)
• MySQL Read Replicas (currently 5)

Backups With Aurora

• Automated backups are always enabled on Amazon Aurora DB Instances. Backups do not impact
database performance.
• You can also take snapshots with Aurora. This also does not impact on performance.
• You can share Aurora Snapshots with other AWS accounts.

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 ElastiCache

ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory
cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you
to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on
slower disk-based databases.

ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines:

• Memcached
• Redis

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