Category: RDS for SQL Server

If you need cross-database access on Amazon RDS for SQL Server but cannot enable TRUSTWORTHY, module signing with certificates is the secure, RDS-compatible alternative. This post shows how to grant cross-database permissions to specific stored procedures without TRUSTWORTHY and with a stronger, least-privilege security posture.

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 reaches its end of extended support on July 14, 2026. If you run it on Amazon RDS for SQL Server with user-defined CLR assemblies, you must replace them before you upgrade, because CLR is not supported on SQL Server 2017 and later. This post shows you how to find your CLR dependencies and compares four replacement strategies.

Learn a complete database administrator workflow for monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving T-SQL query performance issues on Amazon RDS for SQL Server. This post shows how to use Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights, Query Store, and Resource Governor together to detect regressions, diagnose execution plan changes, and isolate analytical workloads.

In this post, you learn how to use the sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint stored procedure on Amazon RDS for SQL Server 2025 to call AWS services and external HTTPS endpoints directly from T-SQL.

In this post, we demonstrate how SQL Server 2025 on Amazon RDS can call Amazon Bedrock foundation models directly from T-SQL using sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint. This approach removes middleware, reduces latency, and brings AI capabilities directly into database workflows.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server recently launched Bring Your Own Media (BYOM), so you can use your existing SQL Server licenses with fully managed RDS instances. This is particularly valuable if you have existing Microsoft licensing agreements and want to optimize your cloud spending by using those investments on AWS. If you’re already running RDS for SQL Server with the license-included (LI) model, you can now convert those instances to BYOM in place, no database migration required. In this post, we walk you through the end-to-end conversion process: preparing your installation media, creating a BYOM engine version, and performing the in-place license model change.

In this post, you learn how to upload your SQL Server installation media to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and launch a BYOM instance.

In this post, we walk through building an agent that investigates blocking and deadlocks on Amazon RDS for SQL Server — two issues that directly impact application performance, cause transaction failures, and lead to user-facing timeouts. Using the Strands Agents framework, we convert the T-SQL queries DBAs already use for these investigations into agent tools, combine them into a single agent, and deploy it to AgentCore Runtime.

As SQL Server workloads grow on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Db2, the 64 TiB storage limit can force architectural issues that constrain business growth and create performance bottlenecks when transaction logs compete with data for I/O resources. The additional storage volumes feature in Amazon RDS for SQL Server solves these challenges. You can use Amazon RDS for SQL Server to attach additional storage volumes beyond the root volume, with each volume having different storage classes and performance characteristics. In this post, you will learn how to use the additional storage volumes feature in Amazon RDS for SQL Server to address these common challenges.

In this post, we demonstrate how to create custom Amazon RDS for SQL Server CloudWatch metrics. You accomplish this by using SQL Server Agent jobs and CloudWatch Logs integration. We walk through an example of monitoring table size within a SQL Server database however, this approach works for various other metrics. You can adapt this approach to track row counts, database size, job counts, user sessions, or other metrics.