AWS Database Blog

Category: RDS for SQL Server

Set up Always Encrypted with Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Customers within a variety of industries (healthcare and life sciences, financial services, and retail, among others) require a stronger security posture. Particularly, if the databases being hosted contain sensitive data such as credit card numbers or national identification numbers (for example, US Social Security numbers), providing a solution that allows you to encrypt this data […]

Configure Multi-AZ with Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom for SQL Server now supports high availability by using block-level replication in a Multi-AZ environment. Previously, to enable high availability on the instance, you had to configure an Always On Availability Group (AG) between two instances. Setting up and configuring Always On requires planning and expertise. With the […]

Client-side T-SQL assessment for SQL Server to Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL migration

Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is a capability for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition that adds an endpoint to PostgreSQL that understands the SQL Server wire protocol Tabular Data Stream (TDS), as well as commonly used T-SQL statements from client applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. Migrating from legacy SQL Server databases can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. […]

Monitor SQL Login creation on Amazon RDS for SQL server

Maintaining database security is indispensable for the success of any organization. Implementing database user authentication and authorization is an important step in securing a database system. Conventional database authentication is based on a username-password mechanism. This process requires constant time and effort from both DBAs and end users to manage the credentials. In contrast, incorporating […]

Audit Amazon RDS for SQL Server using database activity streams

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now supports database activity streams to provide a near-real-time stream of database activities in your relational database. To protect your database from internal and external threats, and to meet compliance and regulatory requirements, you can easily integrate the database activity stream with third-party database activity monitoring […]

Implement Amazon RDS for SQL Server Standard edition cross-Region disaster recovery using access to transaction log backups feature

Today, you can achieve cross-Region disaster recovery (DR) using the Amazon RDS for SQL Server Cross Region Read Replica feature, but it’s only available for workloads running on SQL Server Enterprise edition (EE). You can also use the cross-Region automated backups feature to develop your DR strategy, but recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point […]

Monitor Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server using Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server is a managed database service for applications that require customization of the underlying operating system and database environment. Amazon RDS Custom allows you to access and customize your database server host and operating system, for example, by applying special patches and changing the database software settings to support third-party […]

Persist your OS-level customization within Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server using Custom Engine Version (CEV)

Customers running their Microsoft SQL Server workloads on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom for SQL Server ask us how they can persist changes at the operating system (OS) level even if Amazon RDS chooses to perform a host replacement. In the context of RDS Custom for SQL Server, a host replacement is when […]

Column-level encryption on Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server supports column-level data encryption. Column-level encryption provides encryption at a more granular level of data that can be applied on all or selected columns. With column-level encryption, you can define different encryption keys for each different column. You can use encryption in SQL Server for connections, […]

Capture and tune resource utilization metrics for Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Capturing database resource utilization helps you understand database workload characteristics and usage trends. This data acts as a reference point that can be compared with later measurements to identify and investigate performance issues. Deviations could potentially indicate an area of concern that requires performance tuning, database maintenance, or configuration changes. Resource utilization typically captures metrics […]