Amazon Aurora DSQL

I find it to be super limited, and I'm sort of struggling to see the point given all these constraints.

No temporary tables, no foreign keys, no views, no more than 10k rows in a transaction.

Except for some basic wire compatibility with the postgres protocol, I'd hardly call this a "database", and more a key-value store.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

Just tried a quick test cluster -

  Identifies as PG 16.5
  No views/triggers/sequences
  No foreign key constraints
  No extensions
  No NOTIFY ("ERROR:  Function pg_notify not supported")
  No nested transactions
  No json(b)

Unsupported PG features are now online https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

Marc Brooker's blog has a ~bunch~ bit more technical information

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12/03/aurora-dsql

Specifically, transaction latency is constant relative to transaction statement count, even across region, so I guess that's something

The only announcement I want from AWS about databases is that the price for RDS is going down. Not that they have new chip that is more expensive but offers better price/performance, but that my bill is actually going to drop.

I don't trust them enough to use non-portable technology like this until they give me confidence they are committed to lowering prices.

The fact that it uses "Firecracker microVMs" and a few other things makes me think this is an S3-backed Lambda-based database that emulates Postgres on the wire.

Especially when you consider the recent feature additions to S3.

I won't even consider this without pricing, I can't imagine how anyone could.

Serverless Aurora is stupid-expensive so I can't imagine this is going to be cheap but I keep hunting for that perfect DB that can scale to 0 (or very low) and be priced well.

Right now neon.tech is what I'm using and I'm very happy but this looks like it would be interesting IF the pricing is good.

So does it scale to zero, and scale from zero with <1s latency like Neon DB?

AWS' recent "serverless" products, Aurora Serverless v2 and MSK Serverless for example, had been very misleading with "serverless" title.

I hope it is not a lie this time.

Sooo they're finally launching a Spanner contender?

I'm itching to read more details into what this actually is under the marketing blab.

Very interesting. My dream is to have something like this, a KV-store, a blob store, and pubsub all behind the same interface.

Oof, press release proof readers must have been hit by layoffs

> With its innovative active-active distributed architecture, Aurora DSQL is designed for 99.99% availability in single-Region configuration and 99.999% in multi-Region configuration, with an innovative active-active, distributed architecture, making it ideal for building highly-available applications

We get that its architecture is innovative and active-active

So... its like cockroach db but with the added feature of more vendor lock in?

Virtually unlimited scale :)

Maximum storage GB per cluster: 100GB Maximum size of all data modified within a write transaction 10 MiB Max: 10K rows per transaction

Postgres compatibility depends a bit on what you rely on. This doesn't appear to be postgres under the hood, more wire-compatible.

>Aurora DSQL is PostgreSQL compatible, which means that it provides identical behavior for most supported features, identical query results for all SQL features, and supports many popular PostgreSQL drivers and tools with minor configuration changes. Supported SQL expressions return identical data in query results, including sort order, scale and precision for numeric operations, and equivalence for string operations. With a few documented exceptions, such as synchronous replication, no-lock concurrency control, and asynchronous DDL execution, Aurora DSQL behaves comparably to PostgreSQL.

Aurora DSQL supports core relational features like ACID transactions, secondary indexes, joins, insert, and updates. See Supported SQL expressions for an overview of supported SQL features.

Aurora DSQL doesn't support all PostgreSQL features. For more information, see Unsupported PostgreSQL features.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/wor...

No pricing that I can find

Curious why Murat left the project before it’s launched

If anybody likes to play with Ruby on Rails, I've published a bare bones active record connection adapter:

https://github.com/sj26/activerecord-dsql-adapter

I am confused, what is the difference between Aurora DSQL and Aurora Serverless?

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

In my experience, multi-region databases are used for HA/DR more so than for "writing locally from multiple places". What this means is that the multi-region "consensus cost" is a far easier problem. It looks like DSQL is aiming to change that paradigm: the question is, will this actually mean multiple-region writes become democratized finally? or will this remain more of a database industry marketing talking point that essentially no one uses?

I see many comments about “PostgreSQL compatibility” not being actual compatibility… maybe the PostgreSQL people should compile a list of requirements for a database to call itself “PostgreSQL-compatible”?

It feels like the compatibility claim is a bit abused (not only in this case) mostly because there’s no clear and strict reference (maybe with mandatory and optional requirements) for what “compatible” means

Very interesting announcement!

We are also building a hosted Postgres service based on Firecracker and with the ability to create unlimited databases. Will have to dig in and see how we compare to this. https://www.prisma.io/blog/announcing-prisma-postgres-early-...

It doesn't talk too much about data consistency.

> Amazon Aurora DSQL is a serverless distributed SQL database with virtually unlimited scale, the highest availability, and zero infrastructure management.

I will ignore their claimed almost unlimited scalability (which I somewhat believe as it's in their best interest to make it expensive fast), and "highest" (as compared to what?) availability. But my pet peeve is zero infrastructure management. This is blatantly false and it always was - when they first announced their cloud (at that time called "web") services, when they marketed their solutions as "serverless", and now. You need to have well-trained staff to maintain your AWS infrastructure otherwise you will come across many problems.

Seems like a competitor to Azure's CosmosDB offering , which also now has wire support for postgres.

love that i can spin this up and spend money before any of the documentation is available. neat-o

It's frustrating that there's no pricing information. The tech looks cool and all, but without knowing how much it's going to cost there's no way to really evaluate it.

- Yes, the storage is distributed kv.

- Yes, it's SQL on distributed transactional kv

- SQL layer is stateless, runs in multiple containers

- SQL layer would push down compute logic down to the storage(like, filter/predicate)

....Yes, that reminds me of TiDB

Can Amazon please get RDS product management ducks in a row? You got RDS For PostgreSQL, Aurora PostgreSQL (provisioned), Aurora Serverless v1, Aurora Serverless v2, Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database, Aurora Global Database, and now Aurora DSQL (with PostgreSQL compatibility). It's very confusing, the docs are confusing, and the even the tools are confused.

I think this is pretty big contrast to something like S3 where the product feels far more clearly and coherently managed, and where they have released lots of big improvements/changes over the years without disrupting or muddying the core product in major ways.

Too bad the details how it works aren't available yet: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/get...

    Stay Tuned

    We're sorry. The documentation you are looking for is not yet available. Please check back soon.

    -The Amazon Web Services Documentation Team

DSQL = DHTML for data?