Category: Advanced (300)

August 30, 2023: Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics has been renamed to Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. Read the announcement in the AWS News Blog and learn more. Many graph applications can benefit from the ability to capture changes to items stored in an Amazon Neptune database, at the point in time when such changes […]

This blog post was last reviewed or updated May, 2023. The updated version shown below is based on working backwards from a customer need to use RDS Performance Insights metrics in their APM tool for database observability. Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a feature that monitors Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database instances so […]

Enterprise customers who are currently running on-premises, mission-critical applications on commercial databases are looking for cost-efficient, managed database service offerings. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is one of the target platforms for the relational database workload migration. RDS provides resizable capacity and manages time-consuming and undifferentiated heavy lifting administration tasks. For large-scale database migrations, […]

April 2024: This post was reviewed and updated for accuracy. Gaming leaderboards enable players to gauge their performance against each other. This important social feature increases players’ engagement and encourages competition. Leaderboard data can also inform in-game algorithms that match players against competitors of similar skill levels. In this post, I explore the challenges around […]

If you still have Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 instances deployed, now is the time to upgrade them. Microsoft end of support (EoS) date for each is almost upon us—July 9, 2019. This means that after that there are no further security updates, which has security and also compliance implications, so don’t wait! Today, I’m excited […]

March 2025: This post was reviewed and updated for accuracy. After migrating or launching your new Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition cluster in the AWS Cloud, have you asked yourself one or more of the following questions? What are the next steps? How can I make it run optimally? Is it recommended to modify any existing […]

October 2024: This post was reviewed for accuracy. Additional guidance was added about the trade-offs between high and low timeout settings. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL cloud database service that is designed to provide low-latency and high-throughput performance for applications and services running at scale. Example use cases include: Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) Virtual […]

July 2023: This post was reviewed for accuracy. PostgreSQL is one of the most popular open-source relational database systems. With more than 30 years of development work, PostgreSQL has proven to be a highly reliable and robust database that can handle a large number of complicated data workloads. PostgreSQL is considered to be the primary […]

September 2022: This post was reviewed for accuracy. Scaling up database capacity can be a tedious and risky business. Even veteran developers and database administrators who understand the nuanced behavior of their database and application perform this work cautiously. Despite the current era of sharded NoSQL clusters, increasing capacity can take hours, days, or weeks. […]

In this blog post, we show you how to configure the CloudWatch agent on Amazon EC2 Windows instances to capture custom metrics for SQL Server from Windows performance monitor. We also show you how to publish those custom metrics and monitor them on Amazon CloudWatch console. We also walk you through on how to store custom configuration in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store used by CloudWatch agent to capture those metrics and reuse the same configuration across multiple fleets of SQL Server instances where similar kind of metrics are needed.