SQL and NoSQL Databases

Databases are popular ways to organize and store data for use in applications. Database technologies have been evolving since the 1960s, decades before they became accessible through the internet and cloud-computing platforms.

This lesson describes database solutions available through AWS. Note that some database systems, such as MySQL, an open-source database launched in 1995, are also available through other cloud-computing platforms.

AWS has both SQL and NoSQL database options.

SQL databases on AWS

Here are the SQL database options available through AWS.

Amazon RDS

• It’s designed to support the set up and operations of MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and other SQL databases through AWS.

• It was the first database service introduced by AWS in 2009 and initially supported only MySQL before expanding to support other database systems, including Amazon Aurora.

Amazon Aurora

• It’s a relational database service that’s compatible with both MySQL and PostgreSQL.

• It was initially introduced by Amazon in 2014 and was designed for improved performance and scalability within the AWS environment.

• Actual database performance might vary depending on the usage context. Aurora is priced higher than the non-Aurora version of MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Amazon Redshift

• It’s a relational data warehouse that was introduced by Amazon in 2012.

• While Amazon RDS and Aurora are designed to store and access data for production applications, Redshift (and non-AWS data warehouses such as Snowflake and BigQuery) use different data storage methods that optimize for read-only analytics use cases.

• Data warehouses don’t replace the standard relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL ...