Category: Amazon RDS

With the recent addition of physical replication as an option for RDS Blue/Green Deployments, you can overcome most of the limitations of logical replication. This makes physical replication particularly well-suited for use cases like minor version upgrades, schema changes (DDL operations) in the blue environment, and storage adjustments. In this post, we delve into the advantages of using physical replication in RDS for PostgreSQL blue/green deployments to simplify database operations and scale with application demands. We explore the key benefits of physical replication and provide a step-by-step guide to help you get started with this new capability.

With Amazon RDS for Db2, you can seamlessly authenticate your users and groups with or without Kerberos authentication using a single AWS Microsoft AD directory that can serve multiple accounts. In this post, we use AWS Managed Microsoft AD from an AWS account to provide Microsoft AD authentication to Amazon RDS for Db2 in a different account.

The Amazon RDS for Oracle User Guide provides comprehensive coverage of the maintenance activities in Amazon RDS for Oracle. However, it could be cumbersome to quickly learn about the best practices around various maintenance activities in Amazon RDS for Oracle from the user guide. In this post, we describe the key maintenance activities and the best practices to be followed for each of them.

In this post, we demonstrate improvements in planned failover downtime of Multi-AZ instance deployment with Amazon RDS Proxy, a result of several optimizations made by RDS. In the event of a failure, Amazon RDS automatically switches the roles of the primary and standby instances and updates the IP address associated with the database’s DNS (hostname). This allows client applications to maintain their connection settings during failover. This process, known as DNS propagation, can take up to 35 seconds to complete. RDS Proxy eliminates the 35 seconds of DNS propagation delay by continuously monitoring both instances, allowing it to bypass DNS propagation. This allows RDS Proxy to deliver a faster failover response for client applications, maximizing availability during failovers.

In this post, we introduce postgres_get_av_diag(), a new function available in RDS for PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL to monitor aggressive autovacuum blockers.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL currently supports a variety of Community MySQL major versions including 5.7, 8.0, and 8.4 which present many different features and bug fixes. Upgrading from one major version to another requires careful consideration and planning. For a complete list of compatible major versions, see Supported MySQL major versions […]

In this post, we demonstrate how to set up an event-driven workflow to run stored procedures for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with AWS Lambda to bridge this gap by securely connecting to an Aurora PostgreSQL database using AWS Secrets Manager, making sure that stored procedures can be managed in the cloud. We explore the step-by-step process, discuss the advantages of this approach, and address the limitations of invoking stored procedures from Lambda functions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) users frequently use multiple accounts, organizing them efficiently with AWS Organizations. This system structures the accounts hierarchically and groups them into Organizational Units (OUs). However, this setup can sometimes add complexity, especially for teams that support the entire organization. Consider the following example of a database operations team’s predicament. Their task […]

Today, Amazon RDS has announced support for MySQL version 8.4, which is the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) major version from the MySQL community. With that, Amazon RDS now supports MySQL Community Edition versions 8.0 and 8.4. In addition to the two community-supported LTS releases, Amazon RDS also offers MySQL 5.7 under RDS Extended Support, where RDS provides critical patches and bug fixes for the engine. For any of these versions, you can bring your existing MySQL code, applications, and tools to Amazon RDS. With MySQL 8.4, the MySQL community has introduced, as well as retired, multiple features, which are listed in the MySQL 8.4 reference manual. In this post, we explore some of these features, list known breaking changes, and provide recommendations to ease the migration of your workloads to this version.

August 2025: This post was reviewed and updated for accuracy. PostgreSQL’s ability to handle concurrent access while maintaining data consistency relies heavily on its locking mechanisms, particularly at the row level. When multiple transactions attempt to lock the same row simultaneously, PostgreSQL turns to a specialized structure called MultiXact IDs. While MultiXacts provide an efficient […]