Category: Learning Levels

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.

Every year, businesses and consumers lose billions of dollars to fraud, with consumers reporting $12.5 billion lost to fraud in 2024, a 25% increase year over year. People who commit fraud often work together in organized fraud networks, running many different schemes that companies struggle to detect and stop. In this post, we discuss how to use Amazon Neptune Analytics, a memory-optimized graph database engine for analytics, and GraphStorm, a scalable open source graph machine learning (ML) library, to build a fraud analysis pipeline with AWS services.

In this post, we provide a comprehensive, step-by-step guide for migrating an on-premises self-managed encrypted MySQL database to Amazon Aurora MySQL using AWS DMS homogeneous data migrations over a private network. We show a complete end-to-end example of setting up and executing an AWS DMS homogeneous migration, consolidating all necessary configuration steps and best practices.

For encrypting data at rest, Amazon RDS for Oracle offers two choices: AWS KMS and Oracle TDE. Although both AWS KMS and Oracle TDE provide encryption at rest capabilities, there are various factors to consider when choosing between them, such as licensing, edition dependency, encryption granularity, and feature restrictions. In this post, we provide guidance on choosing between the AWS KMS and Oracle TDE options for encrypting data at rest in RDS for Oracle, focusing on these key aspects.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition supports managed blue/green deployments to help reduce downtime and minimize risk during updates. Even with thorough planning and testing in non-production environments, unexpected issues can emerge after a version upgrade. In these cases, having a rollback plan is essential to quickly restore service stability. While the managed Blue/Green deployment feature doesn’t currently include built-in rollback functionality, you can implement alternative solutions for version management. In this post, we show how you can manually set up a rollback cluster using self-managed logical replication to maintain synchronization with the newer version after an Amazon RDS Blue/Green deployment switchover.

In this post, we explore how a leading AWS customer in the learning services industry successfully modernized its legacy SAP ASE environment by migrating to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. Partnering with AWS, the customer engineered a comprehensive migration strategy to transition from a proprietary system to an open source database while providing high availability, performance optimization, and cost-efficiency.

Database outages, whether planned or unexpected, pose significant challenges to applications. Planned outages for maintenance can be scheduled but still impact users. Unplanned outages are more disruptive and can happen at critical times. Even the most robust and resilient databases will inevitably experience outages, making application resiliency a critical consideration in modern system design. In […]