Press release

AWS Announces New Database Capabilities Including Amazon Aurora DSQL, the Fastest Distributed SQL Database

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At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced new capabilities for Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB to support customers’ most demanding workloads that need to operate across multiple Regions with strong consistency, low latency, and the highest availability whether they want SQL or NoSQL.

  • Amazon Aurora DSQL is a new serverless, distributed SQL database that enables customers to build applications with the highest availability, strong consistency, PostgreSQL compatibility, and 4x faster reads and writes compared to other popular distributed SQL databases.

  • Amazon DynamoDB global tables now supports multi-Region strong consistency, ensuring customers’ multi-Region applications are always reading the latest data without having to change any application code.

  • AWS customers, including Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Klarna, QRT, and Razorpay, are exploring Aurora DSQL to support their rapidly growing businesses.

“Databases are a foundational building block of every application, and customers rely on AWS databases to power their most critical workloads,” said G2 Krishnamoorthy, vice president of Database Services at AWS. “Over the years, we have innovated to provide customers with the widest range of high-performance and scalable databases, including Amazon Aurora, which hundreds of thousands of customers rely on every day. Aurora removes the need for customers to make trade-offs by providing the performance of enterprise grade commercial databases with the flexibility and economics of open source. Now, we’re reimagining the relational database again to deliver strong consistency, global availability, and virtually unlimited scalability, without having to choose between low latency or SQL.”

Amazon Aurora DSQL enables highly resilient applications that meet the most stringent business continuity requirements

Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native relational database that delivers all of the performance and capability of a high-end commercial database, with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of an open source database. However, as customers increasingly build globally distributed, real-time applications with millions of end users around the world, they continue to push the limits of relational databases and want more from Aurora. They want a multi-Region database with low latency, strong consistency, high availability, and zero operational burden—and it has to be SQL. The options available today force trade-offs. Some provide low latency and high availability, but not strong consistency or SQL compatibility. Others provide strong consistency and high availability, but can’t avoid very high latency and still don’t offer SQL compatibility. Now, customers no longer have to compromise with Aurora DSQL, the fastest distributed SQL database that delivers strong consistency, 4x faster reads and writes compared to other popular distributed SQL databases, 99.999% multi-Region availability, virtually unlimited scalability, and zero infrastructure management.

Aurora DSQL’s active-active architecture and automated failure recovery ensure that a customer’s application is always available by enabling an application to read and write to any Aurora DSQL endpoint. All transactions written in one Region are reflected in other Regions with strong consistency. With Aurora DSQL, there is no need to provision, patch, or manage database instances, and all updates and security patching happen with no downtime and zero impact to performance. Aurora DSQL automatically scales to meet any workload demand without database sharding or instance upgrades, and can scale reads and writes independently, eliminating scaling bottlenecks while maintaining performance. Aurora DSQL is PostgreSQL compatible, offering an easy-to-use developer experience.

To make this possible, AWS had to reinvent relational database transaction processing. Aurora DSQL overcomes two historical challenges of distributed databases—achieving multi-Region strong consistency with low latency, and syncing servers with microsecond accuracy around the globe. To achieve multi-Region strong consistency with low latency, Aurora DSQL decouples transaction processing from storage to overcome the limitations of the current approaches, which were constrained by information being passed back and forth multiple times at the speed of light. To overcome this, Aurora DSQL only checks each transaction at commit time and, on commit, parallelizes all the writes across all regions to provide a multi-Region database with strong consistency and fast writes. To ensure each Region sees every database operation in the exact order they occurred, Aurora DSQL uses Amazon Time Sync Service, which added hardware reference clocks on every Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, synchronizing them to satellite-connected atomic clocks to provide microseconds level accurate time within anywhere in the world. By solving these challenges, Amazon Aurora DSQL enables customers to build globally distributed applications on an entirely new scale.

For example, Razorpay, one of the largest fintech companies in India, is looking to use Aurora DSQL to power new fintech solutions, helping them create resilient applications that can rapidly scale to support the needs of their growing user base. Aurora DSQL will help Razorpay achieve multi-Region strong consistency, which is critical for financial use cases that require high degrees of precision, for their applications while operating more efficiently at a global scale.

Amazon DynamoDB global tables now supports multi-Region strong consistency

DynamoDB was the first fully managed, serverless, NoSQL database that transformed what internet-scale applications could achieve by redefining performance and simplifying operations with zero infrastructure management and consistent single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. Today, customers across virtually every industry and size are building and modernizing their critical applications by leveraging DynamoDB global tables, a multi-Region, multi-active database that provides 99.999% availability. AWS is now using the same underlying technology leveraged by Aurora DSQL to enhance DynamoDB global tables, adding the option of strong consistency to the highest availability, virtually unlimited scalability, and zero infrastructure management already available in DynamoDB global tables.

AWS customer Reltio processes more than 9 billion customer profiles for market research and 60 billion API calls annually. In 2020, Reltio went all-in on Amazon DynamoDB to enhance the performance, scaling, and security of its database solution. Now, as Reltio continues to expand globally, the company plans to leverage multi-Region strong consistency in DynamoDB global tables to meet the stringent resilience and performance requirements of its growing customer base.

Both Amazon Aurora DSQL and multi-Region strong consistency in Amazon DynamoDB global tables are available in preview today.

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