aurora

DuckLake spec 1 shipped on 13 April 2026 and keeps lake metadata in a SQL database. DuckDB's architecture note puts Iceberg planning at about 100 ms per sequential S3 GET, roughly half a second before a query starts. On AWS, stay on S3 Tables when Athena, Glue, or Redshift must read the table.

On 2026-07-16 AWS put PostgreSQL 19 Beta 2 in RDS Preview. Our first-party REPACK CONCURRENTLY run cut an 873 MB bloated table to 429 MB in 4.5s with 60/60 concurrent SELECTs succeeding.

For a fintech SaaS (6 prod databases, ~$14k/mo RDS line), scoping in-house DBA for schema + MSP for 24/7 paging cut on-call from 22 to 9 hrs/mo — Aurora Serverless v2 min ACU tuning handled tier-2 first.

On a composite B2B order API (~2.4k RPS peak, 24 ECS tasks on Aurora), running the scaling ladder in order — RDS Proxy, read-replica routing, ElastiCache, then SQS offload — moved modeled p99 from 1,840 ms to 72 ms before any microservice split.

CAP is not a trivia question—it is the reason your global DynamoDB table shows stale inventory or why Aurora Global reads lag 80 ms behind the writer. This guide maps partition tolerance, consistency, and availability trade-offs to concrete AWS controls.

Too many "too many connections" pages are fixed by raising max_connections—which trades one outage for OOM on the writer. This guide traces deadlocks, pool sizing, RDS Proxy, and prepared statement caching on Aurora.

Serializable sounds safest until your checkout times out under row locks. This guide maps READ COMMITTED, REPEATABLE READ, and SERIALIZABLE to RDS/Aurora defaults—and when DynamoDB conditional writes are the BASE alternative.

Autovacuum cannot keep up after Black Friday bulk deletes—and your BRIN index is not helping point lookups. Vacuum strategy on Aurora, plus Aurora Limitless and DynamoDB hot key mitigation.

RDS, Aurora, and self-managed Postgres each have a cost breakeven point. This guide covers total cost of ownership, connection pooling with PgBouncer, indexing strategies, and the edge cases that turn Postgres into a billing surprise.

Multi-region AWS architectures can easily cost 2–3× a single-region equivalent when data replication, cross-region transfer, and duplicated managed services are not accounted for. Here is how to architect for resilience without proportional cost growth.

Aurora is 5× faster than MySQL — until your workload is the one where it isn't. A workload-by-workload framework for picking RDS vs Aurora, with the price-per-IOPS math and the patterns where Aurora's cost doesn't pay back.

Aurora Limitless shards Aurora transparently to hundreds of millions of rows per second. Here's when it beats vertical scaling, how to pick shard keys, and the real cost trade-offs.