Amazon Aurora Parallel Query is a feature of the Amazon Aurora database that provides faster analytical queries over your current data, without having to copy the data into a separate system. It can speed up queries by up to two orders of magnitude, while maintaining high throughput for your core transactional workload.
While some databases can parallelize query processing across CPUs in one or a handful of servers, Parallel Query takes advantage of Aurora’s unique architecture to push down and parallelize query processing across thousands of CPUs in the Aurora storage layer. By offloading analytical query processing to the Aurora storage layer, Parallel Query reduces network, CPU, and buffer pool contention with the transactional workload.
Features
Accelerate Your Analytical Queries
In a traditional database, running analytical queries directly on the database means accepting slower query performance and risking a slowdown of your transactional workload, even when running light queries. Queries can run for several minutes to hours, depending on the size of the tables and database server instances. Queries are also slowed down by network latency, since the storage layer may have to transfer entire tables to the database server for processing.
With Parallel Query, query processing is pushed down to the Aurora storage layer. The query gains a large amount of computing power, and it needs to transfer far less data over the network. In the meantime, the Aurora database instance can continue serving transactions with much less interruption. This way, you can run transactional and analytical workloads alongside each other in the same Aurora database, while maintaining high performance.
Query on Fresh Data
Many analytical workloads require both fresh data and good query performance. For example, operational systems such as network monitoring, cybersecurity or fraud detection rely on fresh, real-time data from a transactional database, and can't wait for it to be extracted to an analytics system.
By running your queries in the same database that you use for transaction processing, without degrading transaction performance, Amazon Aurora Parallel Query enables smarter operational decisions with no additional software and no changes to your queries.
How to Get Started
Parallel Query is available for Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility. It's easy to get started: simply enable Parallel Query when creating your Aurora cluster.
The Aurora query optimizer automatically decides whether to use Parallel Query for every specific query, based on expected performance gains. As with other Aurora queries, you only pay for the actual I/O used.
Learn more about Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility