AWS RDS 101 – Amazon Relational Database Service

What is a Relational Database (RDBMS)?

A relational database is a type of database that stores and provides access to data points that are related to one another. Relational databases are based on the relational model, an intuitive, straightforward way of representing data in tables. In a relational database, each row in the table is a record with a unique ID called the key. The columns of the table hold attributes of the data, and each record usually has a value for each attribute, making it easy to establish the relationships among data points.

ACID properties and RDBMS

Four crucial properties define relational database transactions: atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability—typically referred to as ACID.

• Atomicity defines all the elements that make up a complete database transaction.
• Consistency defines the rules for maintaining data points in a correct state after a transaction.
• Isolation keeps the effect of a transaction invisible to others until it is committed, to avoid confusion.
• Durability ensures that data changes become permanent once the transaction is committed.

Relational Databases Provided by AWS

Features of RDS

RDS has two key features

• Multi -AZ – For DR – Automatic Failover(AWS automatically points the DNS to the IP.)
• Read Replica – For Performance – Heavy read – Read Replicas to Read Replica
• Encryption at Rest – Security – if enabled snapshots/backups/read replicas are also encrypted.
• Backups – Automatic Backup / Manual Snapshots

Non Relational Databases

Non-relational databases (often called NoSQL databases) are different from traditional relational databases in that they store their data in a non-tabular form. Instead, non-relational databases might be based on data structures like documents. A document can be highly detailed while containing a range of different types of information in different formats. This ability to digest and organize various types of information side-by-side makes non-relational databases much more flexible than relational databases.

What is Data warehousing ?

A data warehouse is a type of data management system that is designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. Data warehouses are solely intended to perform queries and analysis and often contain large amounts of historical data.

Difference OLTP Vs OLAP

Online Transaction Processing(OLTP) differs from Online Analytics Processing(OLAP) in terms of the type of query you run. Online transaction processing (OLTP) captures, stores, and processes data from transactions in real time. Online analytical processing (OLAP) uses complex queries to analyze aggregated historical data from OLTP systems.

AWS Data warehousing Solution is Red Shift

What is ElastiCache ?

Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed, in-memory caching service supporting flexible, real-time use cases. You can use ElastiCache for caching, which accelerates application and database performance, or as a primary data store for use cases that don’t require durability like session stores, gaming leaderboards, streaming, and analytics. ElastiCache is compatible with

• Redis
• Memcached. 

Few Take Away