Category: Learning Levels

Fluent Commerce, an omnichannel commerce platform, offers order management solutions that enable businesses to deliver seamless shopping experiences across various channels. Fluent uses Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition as its high-performance OLTP database engine to process their customers’ intricate search queries efficiently. Fluent Commerce strategically combined AWS-based upgrade approaches—including snapshot restores and AWS DMS ongoing replication—to seamlessly upgrade their 32 TB Aurora PostgreSQL databases with minimal downtime. In this post, we explore a pragmatic and cost-effective approach to achieve near-zero downtime during database upgrades. We explore the method of using the snapshot and restore method followed by continuous replication using AWS DMS.

Migrating from SQL Server to Amazon Aurora can significantly reduce database licensing costs and modernize your data infrastructure. To accelerate your migration journey, we have developed a migration solution that offers ease and flexibility. You can use this migration accelerator to achieve fast data migration and minimum downtime while customizing it to meet your specific business requirements. In this post, we showcase the core features of the migration accelerator, demonstrated through a complex use case of consolidating 32 SQL Server databases into a single Amazon Aurora instance with near-zero downtime, while addressing technical debt through refactoring.

AWS Backup supports the creation of on-demand backups of RDS Custom for SQL Server instances. However, the restoration of RDS Custom for SQL Server instances through AWS Backup is not natively supported at the time of writing this post. Nonetheless, this post presents a workaround solution that enables the successful restoration of RDS Custom for SQL Server instances using AWS Backup-created backups.

Generative AI solutions are transforming how businesses operate worldwide. It has now become paramount for businesses to integrate generative AI capabilities into their customer-facing services and applications. The challenge they often face is the need to use massive amounts of relational data hosted on SQL Server databases to contextualize these new generative AI solutions. In this post, we demonstrate how you can address this challenge by combining Amazon RDS for SQL Server and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse.

AWS recently announced, in partnership with Google Cloud and the Valkey community, the general availability of Valkey General Language Independent Driver for the Enterprise (GLIDE) 2.0, the latest release. Valkey GLIDE is multi-language client library designed for reliability and performance. In this post, we discuss what Valkey GLIDE is and its key benefits, and then dive into its new enhancements.

Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon ElastiCache are popular choices for developers powering critical workloads, including global commerce platforms, financial systems, and real-time analytics applications. To enhance productivity, developers are supplementing everyday tasks with AI-assisted tools that understand context, suggest improvements, and help reason through system configurations. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is at the helm of this revolution, rapidly transforming how developers integrate AI assistants into their development pipelines. In this post, we explore the core concepts behind MCP and demonstrate how new AWS MCP servers can accelerate your database development through natural language prompts.

In November 2024, AWS introduced the latest evolution of its custom-designed ARM-based processors with Graviton4, delivering significant performance and efficiency improvements for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB and Amazon Aurora. In this post, we focus on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and compare the performance of the new Graviton4 instances to both Graviton3 and Graviton2. Using benchmarks, we evaluate throughput, latency, and price-performance, showcasing the advantages of Graviton4 for modern database workloads.

In today’s employment landscape, job search platforms play a crucial role in connecting employers with potential candidates. Behind these platforms lie complex search engines that must process and analyze vast amounts of structured and unstructured data to deliver relevant results. This post explores how to use PostgreSQL’s search features to build an effective job search engine. We examine each search capability in detail, discuss how they can be combined in PostgreSQL, and offer strategies for optimizing performance as your search engine scales.

As your business grows and your databases expand into the terabyte range, optimizing your backup strategy becomes increasingly important for maintaining operational excellence. Modern backup solutions that implement incremental backups where possible, offer an elegant way to protect your valuable data while minimizing maintenance windows and ensuring consistent application performance. In this post, we discuss the aspects of maximizing the use of incremental backups in Amazon RDS, leading to backup times remaining steady even while the database grows.

Amazon RDS provides two storage types: Provisioned IOPS SSD and General Purpose SSD. They differ in performance characteristics and price, which means that you can tailor your storage performance and cost to the needs of your database workload. In this post, we show how you can migrate from io1 to io2 Block Express Provisioned IOPS SSD storage.