AWS Database Blog

Understanding time-series data and why it matters

In this post, we discuss the nature of time-series data, its presence across different types of industries and various use cases it enables.Time-series data is one of the most valuable types of data used today by organizations across industries. Time-series data allows for a more in-depth understanding of changes, patterns, and trends over time. This enables organizations to gain insights into past behaviors and current states, as well as predict future values. The sequential tracking of data at precise time intervals enables both retrospective and prospective analysis that is extremely valuable for strategy, planning, and decision-making across industries. In this post, we discuss the nature of time-series data, its presence across different types of industries and various use cases it enables.

Build scalable, event-driven architectures with Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda

By combining DynamoDB streams with Lambda, you can build responsive, scalable, and cost-effective systems that automatically react to data changes in real time. In this post, we explore best practices for architecting event-driven systems using DynamoDB and Lambda. DynamoDB provides two options for capturing data changes (CDC): DynamoDB streams and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (KDS). In this post, we focus exclusively on DynamoDB streams.

Use Amazon ElastiCache as a cache for Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)

In this post, we show you how to use Amazon ElastiCache as a write-through cache for an application that uses an Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) table to store data about book awards. We use a Cassandra Python client driver to access Amazon Keyspaces programmatically and a Redis client to connect to the ElastiCache cluster.

Building a GDPR compliance solution with Amazon DynamoDB

In this post, AWS Service Sector Industry Solutions shares our journey in developing a feature that enables customers to efficiently locate and delete personal data upon request, helping them meet GDPR compliance requirements. The mission of the Service Sector Solutions Engineering Team is to accelerate AWS Cloud adoption across diverse industries, including Travel, Hospitality, Gaming, and Entertainment. We work with customers from Cruise Lines, Lodging, Alternative Accommodation, Travel Agencies, Airports, Airlines, Restaurants, Catering, Casinos, Lotteries, and more.

Heterogeneous data sources: Access your data in PostgreSQL from Amazon RDS for Oracle using Oracle Database Gateway

In certain customer scenarios, Amazon RDS for Oracle databases need to connect to external data sources, such as RDS for PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL can establish connections to Oracle databases using a foreign data wrapper (FDW). In this post, we walk you through setting up an EC2 instance as a database gateway server. You will install and configure Oracle Database Gateway for ODBC (DG4ODBC), ODBC drivers, a PostgreSQL client, and PostgreSQL libraries. With this setup, you can create database links on RDS for Oracle to connect to PostgreSQL through this gateway.

Capture and diagnose I/O bottlenecks on Amazon RDS for SQL Server

In our previous post, Capture and tune resource utilization metrics for Amazon RDS for SQL Server,’ we demonstrated how to use Amazon RDS Enhanced Monitoring and Amazon RDS Performance Insights to diagnose and debug CPU utilization bottlenecks for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server. Aside from CPU and memory, I/O performance is critical for overall database performance. It’s important to understand the I/O requirements of a SQL Server workload, which is dependent on various factors like query access patterns, database schema, and state of database maintenance. Understanding your workload’s, I/O patterns can guide you in selecting the optimal storage type for your RDS instance, balancing performance needs with cost-effectiveness. In this post, we demonstrate how you can use Amazon RDS monitoring tools along with SQL Server monitoring capabilities to capture, diagnose, and resolve I/O issues on an RDS for SQL Server instance.

Best practices for running Apache Cassandra with Amazon EBS

This is a guest post written by Jon Haddad an Apache Cassandra committer specializing in performance tuning, fixing broken clusters, and cost optimization. In this post, we discuss the basics of improving the performance of Amazon EBS with Cassandra to take advantage of the operational benefits. We explore some basic tools used by Cassandra operators to gain insight into key performance metrics. You can then apply these metrics to modify key operating system (OS) tuneables and Cassandra configuration. Finally, we review benchmarks on performance gains by implementing best practices for Amazon EBS.

Tune Amazon RDS for Oracle CDBs with Amazon Performance Insights

With Oracle Multitenant, you can consolidate standalone databases by either creating them as PDBs or migrating them to PDBs. Performance Insights has introduced a new PDB dimension to help you visualize and analyze the distribution of the load on individual PDBs within the CDB on a RDS for Oracle instance. Now, you can slice the database load metric by the PDB and SQL dimensions to identify the top queries running on each of the PDBs. In this post, we will discuss how to identify resource-intensive SQL queries at a PDB level on a visual dashboard in Performance Insights.