Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide

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Amazon Relational Database Service

User Guide

Amazon Relational Database Service: User Guide

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What is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)?

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. It provides cost-eﬃcient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

NoteThis guide covers Amazon RDS database engines other than Amazon Aurora. For information about using Amazon Aurora, see the Amazon Aurora User Guide.

If you are new to AWS products and services, begin learning more with the following resources:

• For an overview of all AWS products, see What is cloud computing?

• Amazon Web Services provides a number of database services. For guidance on which service is best for your environment, see Running databases on AWS.

Overview of Amazon RDS

Why do you want to run a relational database in the AWS Cloud? Because AWS takes over many of the diﬃcult and tedious management tasks of a relational database.

Topics

• Amazon EC2 and on-premises databases (p. 1)

• Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2 (p. 2)

• Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server (p. 3)

Amazon EC2 and on-premises databases

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS Cloud.

Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster.

When you buy an on-premises server, you get CPU, memory, storage, and IOPS, all bundled together.

With Amazon EC2, these are split apart so that you can scale them independently. If you need more CPU, less IOPS, or more storage, you can easily allocate them.

For a relational database in an on-premises server, you assume full responsibility for the server, operating system, and software. For a database on an Amazon EC2 instance, AWS manages the layers below the operating system. In this way, Amazon EC2 eliminates some of the burden of managing an on- premises database server.

In the following table, you can ﬁnd a comparison of the management models for on-premises databases and Amazon EC2.

Feature On-premises management Amazon EC2 management

Application optimization Customer Customer

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Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2

Feature On-premises management Amazon EC2 management

Scaling Customer Customer

High availability Customer Customer

Database backups Customer Customer

Database software patching Customer Customer

Database software install Customer Customer

Operating system (OS) patching Customer Customer

OS installation Customer Customer

Server maintenance Customer AWS

Hardware lifecycle Customer AWS

Power, network, and cooling Customer AWS

Amazon EC2 isn't a fully managed service. Thus, when you run a database on Amazon EC2, you're more prone to user errors. For example, when you update the operating system or database software manually, you might accidentally cause application downtime. You might spend hours checking every change to identify and ﬁx an issue.

Amazon RDS and Amazon EC2

Amazon RDS is a managed database service. It's responsible for most management tasks. By eliminating tedious manual tasks, Amazon RDS frees you to focus on your application and your users. We

recommend Amazon RDS over Amazon EC2 as your default choice for most database deployments.

In the following table, you can ﬁnd a comparison of the management models in Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS.

Feature Amazon EC2 management Amazon RDS management

Application optimization Customer Customer

Scaling Customer AWS

High availability Customer AWS

Database backups Customer AWS

Database software patching Customer AWS

Database software install Customer AWS

OS patching Customer AWS

OS installation Customer AWS

Server maintenance AWS AWS

Hardware lifecycle AWS AWS

Power, network, and cooling AWS AWS

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Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server

Amazon RDS provides the following speciﬁc advantages over database deployments that aren't fully managed:

• You can use the database products you are already familiar with: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server.

• Amazon RDS manages backups, software patching, automatic failure detection, and recovery.

• You can turn on automated backups, or manually create your own backup snapshots. You can use these backups to restore a database. The Amazon RDS restore process works reliably and eﬃciently.

• You can get high availability with a primary instance and a synchronous secondary instance that you can fail over to when problems occur. You can also use read replicas to increase read scaling.

• In addition to the security in your database package, you can help control who can access your RDS databases by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to deﬁne users and permissions. You can also help protect your databases by putting them in a virtual private cloud (VPC).

Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server

Amazon RDS Custom is an RDS management type that gives you full access to your database and operating system.

You can use the control capabilities of RDS Custom to access and customize the database environment and operating system for legacy and packaged business applications. Meanwhile, Amazon RDS automates database administration tasks and operations.

In this deployment model, you can install applications and change configuration settings to suit your applications. At the same time, you can offload database administration tasks such as provisioning, scaling, upgrading, and backup to AWS. You can take advantage of the database management benefits of Amazon RDS, with more control and flexibility.

For Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server, RDS Custom combines the automation of Amazon RDS with the ﬂexibility of Amazon EC2. For more information on RDS Custom, see Working with Amazon RDS Custom (p. 713).

With the shared responsibility model of RDS Custom, you get more control than in Amazon RDS, but also more responsibility. For more information, see Shared responsibility model (p. 715).

DB instances

A DB instance is an isolated database environment in the AWS Cloud. The basic building block of Amazon RDS is the DB instance.

Your DB instance can contain one or more user-created databases. You can access your DB instance by using the same tools and applications that you use with a standalone database instance. You can create and modify a DB instance by using the AWS Command Line Interface, the Amazon RDS API, or the AWS Management Console.

DB engines

A DB engine is the speciﬁc relational database software that runs on your DB instance. Amazon RDS currently supports the following engines:

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DB instance classes

• MySQL

• MariaDB

• PostgreSQL

• Oracle

• Microsoft SQL Server

Each DB engine has its own supported features, and each version of a DB engine may include speciﬁc features. Additionally, each DB engine has a set of parameters in a DB parameter group that control the behavior of the databases that it manages.

DB instance classes

A DB instance class determines the computation and memory capacity of a DB instance. A DB instance class consists of both the DB instance type and the size. Each instance type oﬀers diﬀerent compute, memory, and storage capabilities. For example, db.m6g is a general-purpose DB instance type powered by AWS Graviton2 processors, while db.m6g.2xlarge is a DB instance class.

You can select the DB instance that best meets your needs. If your needs change over time, you can change DB instances. For information, see DB instance classes (p. 9).

NoteFor pricing information on DB instance classes, see the Pricing section of the Amazon RDS product page.

DB instance storage

Amazon EBS provides durable, block-level storage volumes that you can attach to a running instance. DB instance storage comes in the following types:

• General Purpose (SSD)

• Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS)

• Magnetic

The storage types diﬀer in performance characteristics and price. You can tailor your storage performance and cost to the needs of your database.

Each DB instance has minimum and maximum storage requirements depending on the storage type and the database engine it supports. It's important to have suﬃcient storage so that your databases have room to grow. Also, suﬃcient storage makes sure that features for the DB engine have room to write content or log entries. For more information, see Amazon RDS DB instance storage (p. 52).

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

You can run a DB instance on a virtual private cloud (VPC) using the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) service. When you use a VPC, you have control over your virtual networking environment.

You can choose your own IP address range, create subnets, and conﬁgure routing and access control lists.

The basic functionality of Amazon RDS is the same whether it's running in a VPC or not. Amazon RDS manages backups, software patching, automatic failure detection, and recovery. There's no additional cost to run your DB instance in a VPC. For more information on using Amazon VPC with RDS, see Amazon Virtual Private Cloud VPCs and Amazon RDS (p. 2194).

Amazon RDS uses Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize the time on DB Instances.

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AWS Regions and Availability Zones

Amazon cloud computing resources are housed in highly available data center facilities in diﬀerent areas of the world (for example, North America, Europe, or Asia). Each data center location is called an AWS Region.

Each AWS Region contains multiple distinct locations called Availability Zones, or AZs. Each Availability Zone is engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones. Each is engineered to provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same AWS Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from the failure of a single location. For more information, see Regions, Availability Zones, and Local Zones (p. 59).

You can run your DB instance in several Availability Zones, an option called a Multi-AZ deployment.

When you choose this option, Amazon automatically provisions and maintains one or more secondary standby DB instances in a diﬀerent Availability Zone. Your primary DB instance is replicated across Availability Zones to each secondary DB instance. This approach helps provide data redundancy and failover support, eliminate I/O freezes, and minimize latency spikes during system backups. In a Multi- AZ DB clusters deployment, the secondary DB instances can also serve read traﬃc. For more information, see Multi-AZ deployments for high availability (p. 64).

Security

A security group controls the access to a DB instance. It does so by allowing access to IP address ranges or Amazon EC2 instances that you specify.

For more information about security groups, see Security in Amazon RDS (p. 2093).

Monitoring an Amazon RDS DB instance

There are several ways that you can track the performance and health of a DB instance. You can use the Amazon CloudWatch service to monitor the performance and health of a DB instance. CloudWatch performance charts are shown in the Amazon RDS console. You can also subscribe to Amazon RDS events to be notiﬁed about changes to a DB instance, DB snapshot, DB parameter group, or DB security group.

For more information, see Monitoring metrics in an Amazon RDS instance (p. 490).

How to work with Amazon RDS

There are several ways that you can interact with Amazon RDS.

AWS Management Console

The AWS Management Console is a simple web-based user interface. You can manage your DB instances from the console with no programming required. To access the Amazon RDS console, sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon RDS console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/rds/.

Command line interface

You can use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to access the Amazon RDS API interactively. To install the AWS CLI, see Installing the AWS Command Line Interface. To begin using the AWS CLI for RDS, see AWS Command Line Interface reference for Amazon RDS.

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Programming with Amazon RDS

If you are a developer, you can access the Amazon RDS programmatically. For more information, see Amazon RDS application programming interface (API) reference (p. 2238).

For application development, we recommend that you use one of the AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs). The AWS SDKs handle low-level details such as authentication, retry logic, and error handling, so that you can focus on your application logic. AWS SDKs are available for a wide variety of languages. For more information, see Tools for Amazon web services .

AWS also provides libraries, sample code, tutorials, and other resources to help you get started more easily. For more information, see Sample code & libraries.

How you are charged for Amazon RDS

When you use Amazon RDS, you can choose to use on-demand DB instances or reserved DB instances.

For more information, see DB instance billing for Amazon RDS (p. 81).

For Amazon RDS pricing information, see the Amazon RDS product page.

What's next?

The preceding section introduced you to the basic infrastructure components that RDS oﬀers. What should you do next?

Getting started

Create a DB instance using instructions in Getting started with Amazon RDS (p. 98).

Topics speciﬁc to database engines

You can review information speciﬁc to a particular DB engine in the following sections:

• MariaDB on Amazon RDS (p. 835)

• Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon RDS (p. 921)

• MySQL on Amazon RDS (p. 1131)

• Oracle on Amazon RDS (p. 1291)

• PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS (p. 1904)

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DB instances

Amazon RDS DB instances

A DB instance is an isolated database environment running in the cloud. It is the basic building block of Amazon RDS. A DB instance can contain multiple user-created databases, and can be accessed using the same client tools and applications you might use to access a standalone database instance. DB instances are simple to create and modify with the Amazon AWS command line tools, Amazon RDS API operations, or the AWS Management Console.

NoteAmazon RDS supports access to databases using any standard SQL client application. Amazon RDS does not allow direct host access.

You can have up to 40 Amazon RDS DB instances, with the following limitations:

• 10 for each SQL Server edition (Enterprise, Standard, Web, and Express) under the "license-included"

model

• 10 for Oracle under the "license-included" model

• 40 for MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL

• 40 for Oracle under the "bring-your-own-license" (BYOL) licensing model

NoteIf your application requires more DB instances, you can request additional DB instances by using this form.

Each DB instance has a DB instance identifier. This customer-supplied name uniquely identifies the DB instance when interacting with the Amazon RDS API and AWS CLI commands. The DB instance identifier must be unique for that customer in an AWS Region.

The identifier is used as part of the DNS hostname allocated to your instance by RDS. For example, if you specify db1 as the DB instance identifier, then RDS will automatically allocate a DNS endpoint for your instance, such as db1.123456789012.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com, where 123456789012 is the fixed identifier for a specific region for your account.

Each DB instance supports a database engine. Amazon RDS currently supports MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora database engines.

When creating a DB instance, some database engines require that a database name be speciﬁed. A DB instance can host multiple databases, or a single Oracle database with multiple schemas. The database name value depends on the database engine:

• For the MySQL and MariaDB database engines, the database name is the name of a database hosted in your DB instance. Databases hosted by the same DB instance must have a unique name within that instance.

• For the Oracle database engine, database name is used to set the value of ORACLE_SID, which must be supplied when connecting to the Oracle RDS instance.

• For the Microsoft SQL Server database engine, database name is not a supported parameter.

• For the PostgreSQL database engine, the database name is the name of a database hosted in your DB instance. A database name is not required when creating a DB instance. Databases hosted by the same DB instance must have a unique name within that instance.

Amazon RDS creates a master user account for your DB instance as part of the creation process. This master user has permissions to create databases and to perform create, delete, select, update, and insert operations on tables the master user creates. You must set the master user password when you create a DB instance, but you can change it at any time using the AWS CLI, Amazon RDS API operations, or the

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DB instances

AWS Management Console. You can also change the master user password and manage users using standard SQL commands.

NoteThis guide covers non-Aurora Amazon RDS database engines. For information about using Amazon Aurora, see the Amazon Aurora User Guide.

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DB instance classes

The DB instance class determines the computation and memory capacity of an Amazon RDS DB instance.

A DB instance class consists of both the DB instance type and the size. The DB instance class you need depends on your processing power and memory requirements.

For more information about instance class pricing, see Amazon RDS pricing.

Topics

• DB instance class types (p. 9)

• Supported DB engines for DB instance classes (p. 11)

• Determining DB instance class support in AWS Regions (p. 28)

• Changing your DB instance class (p. 31)

• Conﬁguring the processor for a DB instance class (p. 31)

• Hardware speciﬁcations for DB instance classes (p. 44)

DB instance class types

Amazon RDS supports three types of instance classes: standard, memory optimized, and burstable performance. For more information about Amazon EC2 instance types, see Instance types in the Amazon EC2 documentation.

The following are the standard DB instance types available:

• db.m6g – General-purpose instance classes powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. These deliver balanced compute, memory, and networking for a broad range of general purpose workloads.

You can modify a DB instance to use one of the DB instance classes powered by AWS Graviton2 processors by completing the same steps as any other DB instance modiﬁcation.

• db.m6gd – General-purpose instance classes powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. These deliver balanced compute, memory, and networking for a broad range of general purpose workloads. These have local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage for applications that need high-speed, low latency local storage.

These DB instance classes are only supported for Multi-AZ DB clusters. For more information about Multi-AZ DB clusters, see Multi-AZ DB cluster deployments (p. 70).

• db.m5d – Newest generation instance classes that are optimized for low latency, very high random I/O performance, and high sequential read throughput.

• db.m5 – Latest generation general-purpose instance classes that provide a balance of compute, memory, and network resources, and are a good choice for many applications. The db.m5 instance classes provide more computing capacity than the previous db.m4 instance classes. They are powered by the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor.

• db.m4 – General-purpose instance classes that provide more computing capacity than the previous db.m3 instance classes.

• db.m3 – General-purpose instance classes that provide more computing capacity than the previous db.m1 instance classes.

The following are the memory optimized DB instance types available:

• db.x2g – Instance classes optimized for memory-intensive applications and powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. These oﬀer low cost per GiB of memory.

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DB instance class types

• db.z1d – Instance classes optimized for memory-intensive applications. These oﬀer both high compute capacity and a high memory footprint. High frequency z1d instances deliver a sustained all core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz.

• db.x1e – Instance classes optimized for memory-intensive applications. These oﬀer one of the lowest price per gibibyte (GiB) of RAM among the DB instance classes and up to 3,904 GiB of DRAM-based instance memory.

• db.x1 – Instance classes optimized for memory-intensive applications. These oﬀer one of the lowest price per GiB of RAM among the DB instance classes and up to 1,952 GiB of DRAM-based instance memory.

• db.r6g – Instance classes powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. These are ideal for running memory- intensive workloads in open-source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL.

• db.r6gd – Instance classes powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. These are ideal for running memory-intensive workloads in open-source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. These have local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage for applications that need high-speed, low latency local storage.

These DB instance classes are only supported for Multi-AZ DB clusters. For more information about Multi-AZ DB clusters, see Multi-AZ DB cluster deployments (p. 70).

• db.r5b – Instance classes that are memory optimized for throughput-intensive applications. Powered by the AWS Nitro System, db.r5b instances deliver up to 60 Gbps bandwidth and 260,000 IOPS of EBS performance, which is the fastest block storage performance on EC2.

• db.r5d – Instance classes that are optimized for low latency, very high random I/O performance, and high sequential read throughput.

• db.r5 – Latest generation instance classes optimized for memory-intensive applications. These oﬀer improved networking and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) performance. They are powered by the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor.

• db.r3 – Instance classes that provide memory optimization.

The following are the burstable performance DB instance types available:

• db.t4g – Newest-generation general-purpose instance classes powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. These deliver better price performance than previous-generation burstable performance DB instance classes for a broad set of burstable general-purpose workloads. Amazon RDS T4g instances are conﬁgured for Unlimited mode, which means that they can burst beyond the baseline over a 24-hour window for an additional charge.

You can modify a DB instance to use one of the DB instance classes powered by AWS Graviton2 processors by completing the same steps as with any other DB instance modiﬁcation.

• db.t3 – Next generation instance classes that provide a baseline performance level, with the ability to burst to full CPU usage. T3 instances are conﬁgured for Unlimited mode. These instance classes provide more computing capacity than the previous db.t2 instance classes. They are powered by the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor.

• db.t2 – Instance classes that provide a baseline performance level, with the ability to burst to full CPU usage. T2 instances can be conﬁgured for Unlimited mode. We recommend using these instance classes only for development and test servers, or other nonproduction servers.

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Supported DB engines

NoteThe DB instance classes that use the AWS Nitro System (db.m5, db.r5, db.t3) are throttled on combined read plus write workload.

For DB instance class hardware speciﬁcations, see Hardware speciﬁcations for DB instance classes (p. 44).

Supported DB engines for DB instance classes

The following are DB engine–speciﬁc considerations for DB instance classes:

Microsoft SQL Server

DB instance class support varies according to the version and edition of SQL Server. For instance class support by version and edition, see DB instance class support for Microsoft SQL Server (p. 925).

Oracle

DB instance class support varies according to the Oracle Database version and edition. RDS for Oracle supports additional memory-optimized instance classes. These classes have names of the form db.r5.instance_size.tpcthreads_per_core.memratio. For the vCPU count and memory allocation for each optimized class, see Supported Oracle DB instance classes (p. 1310).

In the following table, you can ﬁnd details about supported Amazon RDS DB instance classes for each Amazon RDS DB engine.

Instance class MariaDB Microsoft

SQL Server MySQL Oracle PostgreSQL

db.m6g – standard instance classes powered by AWS Graviton2 processors

db.m6g.16xlarge All MariaDB

10.6 versions, all MariaDB 10.5 versions, and MariaDB version 10.4.13 &

higher 10.4 versions

No MySQL 8.0.17

& higher No All

PostgreSQL 14 & 13 versions, and PostgreSQL 12.3 & higher 12 versions

10.6 versions, all MariaDB 10.5 versions, and MariaDB version 10.4.13 &

higher 10.4 versions

No MySQL 8.0.17

& higher No All

PostgreSQL 14 & 13 versions, and PostgreSQL 12.3 & higher 12 versions

10.6 versions, all MariaDB 10.5 versions, and MariaDB version

No MySQL 8.0.17

& higher No PostgreSQL

14 and 13 versions, and PostgreSQL 12.3 & higher 12 versions

Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide