AWS Database Blog

This is Part 1 of a two-part series covering the key features in PostgreSQL 18. In this post, we focus on performance enhancements: skip scan optimization for multicolumn indexes, enhanced EXPLAIN output, automatic removal of unnecessary self-joins, and several vacuum and autovacuum improvements that help keep your database running efficiently.

In Part 1 of this series, we explored the performance enhancements in PostgreSQL 18, including skip scan optimization, enhanced EXPLAIN output, automatic self-join removal, and vacuum/autovacuum improvements. In this second part, we focus on security, monitoring, developer productivity, and logical replication enhancements that improve operational efficiency and the overall developer experience.

In this post, we show you how to use Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights for lock analysis in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. You learn how to enable the feature, interpret lock tree visualizations, resolve common lock-related issues, and maintain optimal database performance. This lock tree analysis feature also applies to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

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.

Managing massive data volumes at scale presents significant operational challenges. At Similarweb we faced these challenges with Apache HBase and found a solution in Amazon DynamoDB. Similarweb is a digital intelligence platform that provides AI-powered insights into website traffic, app usage, and market trends to help businesses benchmark competitors and optimize growth strategies. We faced growing scalability and operational complexity issues with our existing Apache HBase infrastructure, which prompted us to explore more flexible and efficient alternatives. This post walks you through our journey migrating our data storage from Apache HBase to DynamoDB. We discuss the technical challenges, migration approach, data modeling strategies, cost optimization techniques, and key benefits achieved along the way.

In this post, we show you how to use EXPLAIN plans to diagnose and improve query performance in Amazon Aurora DSQL. We introduce a three-layer filter model as a practical framework for understanding where your predicates are evaluated, and walk through the architecture differences that make Aurora DSQL plans unique, the anatomy of an EXPLAIN output, access method selection, and a step-by-step query improvement workflow.

In this post, we show you how to provision key components of the Oracle Database@AWS offering, including the ODB network, Oracle Exadata infrastructure, Exadata VM clusters and Autonomous VM clusters using Terraform.

Managing Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition upgrades across multiple database clusters can be time-consuming and error-prone when done manually. In this post, we show you how to automate Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL upgrades across your entire database fleet through consistent, repeatable procedures.

In this post, you learn how to use AWS DMS Schema Conversion to migrate Oracle schemas to PostgreSQL. AWS DMS Schema Conversion converts database schemas and code objects to formats compatible with your target database. You also learn how to use AWS DMS to migrate data to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition.

In this post, you will learn how to integrate Okta with AWS IAM Identity Center and implement Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) authentication to create a unified authentication flow. You configure attribute-based access control (ABAC) that automatically maps user identities from your IdP to database permissions, supporting interactive user sessions and helping you avoid shared accounts. By the end, you have a working system where database authentication works exactly like your application authentication.