Author: Wendy Neu

Automation has been both an adjustment and a gift to traditional database administrators (DBAs). Most traditional responsibilities of a DBA involve provisioning, access control, maintenance, monitoring, high availability, and backup/restore. In Part 1 of our series, we talked about how that role evolved to focus less on platform and more on applications. In Part 2, […]

July 2023: This post was reviewed for accuracy. At Amazon, we listen to our customers and work backward from your needs. Our AWS Database Specialist Solutions Architect team helps you architect your database landscape. In this post, we address 11 frequently asked questions with videos from our Database Specialist Solutions Architects. Let’s begin the learning […]

July 2023: This post was reviewed for accuracy. Do you want to move from a relational database to NoSQL? In the following post, I walk you through reading, transforming, and writing SQL Server data from an Amazon EC2 instance to Amazon DynamoDB. I use AWS Glue to transform the source data model of multiple tables […]

July 2023: This post was reviewed for accuracy. In this blog post, I talk about how you can use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to understand when you might benefit from provisioned IOPS, also known as IO1 volumes, for highest performance mission-critical database workloads. I start by setting up a test case that simulates a nonbursting consistent […]

July 2023: This post was reviewed for accuracy. Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports a delayed replication, which allows you to set a time period that a replica database lags behind a source database. In a standard MySQL replication configuration, there is minimal delay between the source and the replica. Now you have the option […]

July 2023: This post was reviewed for accuracy. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) enables you to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage database access for Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instances and Amazon Aurora MySQL DB clusters. Database administrators can associate database users with IAM users and roles. By using IAM, you can manage user access to all […]

In Part 1 of this blog series, I talked about how Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) can help change the focus of your role as a database administrator (DBA) from routine, time-consuming tasks to project work that helps the business move faster. In this post, I discuss how you can push that advantage one step further and use AWS tools to do more through automation. An important aspect of being an effective DBA when your business is running at top speed is using code and automation whenever you can. AWS provides tools for you to make this easier.

July 2023: This post was reviewed for accuracy. Recently, AWS Database Migration Services (AWS DMS) added support for using Amazon S3 as a source for your database migration. This new support means that you can now load data in comma-separated value (CSV) format from S3 into any supported target, whether or not the target has […]

Amazon Aurora offers a high-performance advanced auditing feature that logs detailed database activity to the database audit logs in Amazon CloudWatch. If you are using Aurora 1.10.1 or greater, you can use advanced auditing to meet regulatory or compliance requirements by capturing eligible events like tables queried, queries issued, and connections and disconnections. You can […]

This blog post is the first in a two-part series. In this first post, we discuss how moving to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) can change your role as a traditional DBA and bring more value to you, the business, key projects, and end users. In the next post, we will discuss how to use other AWS products to automate any remaining regular tasks in Amazon RDS.