Amazon Aurora DSQL FAQs

Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless distributed SQL database designed to scale to meet any workload demand with up to 99.999% multi-Region availability and no infrastructure management. It is PostgreSQL-compatible and provides an easy-to-use developer experience. With Aurora DSQL, you only pay for what you use.

Aurora DSQL is optimized for transactional (OLTP) workloads.

With a few clicks in the Aurora DSQL console, you can create a new database. For more details, go to the user guide.

Aurora DSQL is currently generally available for single-Region and multi-Region in the following 9 AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), and Europe (Paris) with more Regions coming soon.

The Aurora DSQL distributed architecture is designed to automatically deploy each component—compute, commit, and storage—independently to meet any workload demand and with no single leader. This reduces dependencies and allows reads and writes to dynamically scale up/down and out/in to virtually no limit. It also means Aurora DSQL can deploy each component quickly with no impact on performance.

Aurora DSQL removes the need to upgrade or migrate your database to larger instances. It automatically scales out to virtually no limit to meet any workload demand.

Yes, Aurora DSQL is PostgreSQL-compatible. To learn more, visit the Aurora DSQL PostgreSQL-compatible page for details on what is and is not supported.

No, Aurora DSQL is not available with MySQL compatibility.

No, Aurora DSQL is a new database option under Amazon Aurora. Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL provide the choice of add-on features, such as Aurora Serverless v2, Aurora Global Database, and Aurora Limitless Database, to enhance the open source engines. With Aurora DSQL, serverless, high-availability, and scaling features come built in.

Highest availability means Aurora DSQL provides up to 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability to help ensure your applications are always available.

Active-active means that your applications can continue to read and write with strong consistency, even in the rare case an application is unable to connect to a multi-Region cluster endpoint.

With Aurora DSQL, there are no primary or secondary nodes to configure and no failover procedures to manage. It has built-in fault tolerance, featuring automatic load balancing that routes your requests to healthy components and automated self-healing to correct component-level failures.

Aurora DSQL uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies for cluster authentication and PostgreSQL-compatible role-based permissions.

This means Aurora DSQL supports many of the commonly used PostgreSQL queries and popular features. It will return identical query results for all supported features, provide identical behavior for most supported features, and support many popular PG drivers and tools with minor configuration changes. Visit the Aurora DSQL PostgreSQL-compatible page  for more details.

Aurora SQL automatically manages minor version updates. Major version upgrades are controlled by the customer. Only by customer request will Aurora DSQL automatically perform major version upgrades. Aurora DSQL’s distributed architecture makes it capable to perform these updates with no downtime or impact on performance.

Aurora DSQL automatically handles patching with no downtime.

The cost will vary based on your usage. Billing for Aurora DSQL is based on two primary measures: 1/ Distributed Processing Unit (DPU) and 2/ storage. DPU is a normalized billing unit for all request-based activity, such as query processing, reads, and writes. For example, in the US East (N. Virginia), the cost is $8 per million DPU, and storage is billed at $0.33 per GB-month. To learn more, go to Aurora DSQL pricing.

Yes, the AWS Free Tier provides the first 100,000 DPUs and 1 GB-month of storage each month for free with Aurora DSQL. See more details on the AWS Free Tier page.