Databases

Different database options inside AWS

Essentials

Relational (SQL) Databases

• Structured Data (schema)

• Data is normalized and spread across multiple tables

• SQL Query Language

• ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) Compliant

• Vertical Scaling and Read Replicas

• OLTP/OLAP

  • OLTP - Transactional - Good for reads/writes

  • OLAP - Analytical - Good for queries

• Examples: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL

NoSQL Databases

• Semi-structured Data (schema-less)

• Flat table structure

• API Queries

• High Transaction Rates

• Horizontal Scaling

• Four Types: Column, Key-Value, Document, Graph

  • Column - Stores in columns, fast for querying (only looking in certain columns by query)

  • Key-Value - Simple (key and a value)

  • Document - JSON/XML storage

  • Graph - Relationship between data optimizations

• Examples: MongoDB, CouchDB, HBase, Cassandra, Riak

AWS Managed DB Services

Offloading a lot of maintenance and optimization, also usually serverless so they scale very well and have fault tolerance/high availability! But managed services may not be optimized outside of a given database like Mongodb or Cassandra. Also, you don't get privileged access to tweaking and tuning.

• Relational DB Services

  • RDS - Many engines like MySQL available

  • Redshift

• NoSQL DB Services

  • DynamoDB - Document DB

  • ElastiCache - Key-Value DB

  • Neptune - Graph DB

  • HBase on EMR - Column DB