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Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

aws.amazon.com

31–40 of 138 posts

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#31

Has anyone been able to find specific pricing on this? All of the language I've seen about it has been vague. One of the things that's kept me from using RDS for toy projects is that it basically amounts to running another instance on top of what I already have. For a "real" project, that's a drop in the bucket, but for toys and prototypes, it can be a significant chunk of the cost (so I usually end up just running m…

I'd think for most toy projects, running more than an EC2 instance or two is overkill. At least in my experiences, running the full stack on a single server works well enough for most hobby projects.

I certainly don't want to spend $7 a day playing around with RDS for fun!

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#35
post #19
post #4

4 times faster than MySQL on the same platform, how did they pull that off?

Here is what they claim in the FAQ: "Amazon Aurora delivers significant increases over MySQL performance by tightly integrating the database engine with an SSD-based virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads, reducing writes to the storage system, minimizing lock contention and eliminating delays created by database process threads. Our tests with SysBench show that Amazon Aurora delivers over 50…

I'd love to see more details (active benchmarking). At the very least, what is the CPU and disk utilization during the benchmark? It'll shed some light on how this was done: a 5x improvement in cycles per query? Or better caching?

People will benchmark this themselves ASAP. If you do, try to include some basic system metrics. The output of "vmstat 10", "iostat -x 10", and some "pidstat -t 1" would be a great start. This may only be possible for the MySQL benchmark, if Aurora is only visible via an API, and the database system can't be accessed directly (?).

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#36
post #23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your data is fundamentally relational you're better off putting it into a relational DB. http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never...

Just want to point out that the headline is sensational and there are many good use cases for document stores.

The headline doesn't mention document stores, it mentions MongoDB.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#38
post #5

“Aurora" is already the name of a cloud infrastructure management product, an open-souce apache project no less: http://aurora.incubator.apache.org/ Using an existing name for a product in a similar space is just confusing and hurts everyone.

To be fair, I just searched for "aurora software" and "aurora open source" and got nothing for that project on the first page of results. A lot of the good names are already taken; there's going to be overlap, and they're very different products.

Name-clashing with an Apache project really surprises me. Also, consider the fact that Aurora stems from Mesos, which supposedly Amazon (cloud; although DB people are doing this one) folks have to know.

Re: Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine

#39
post #28

I think the problem AWS is seeing is how they are being commoditized (e.g. you can just run your database on the cheapest hosting provider), so profits will move towards 0. They will need to add more services like this (Aurora, DynamoDB, etc.) to ensure AWS isn't a commodity (and you can't just easily switch to DigitalOcean).

I think that the AWS vendor lock-in won't come from single features such as databases from specific vendors, but rather the ecosystem of Route53, elastic load balancers, S3, EBS, AMIs, Glacier, RDS, CloudFormation templates, SQS, security groups, libraries like boto, auto scaling groups, and everything else besides instance provisioning. Of course you can implement most of these yourself, e.g., HAProxy for ELBs, rabbitmq for SQS, but all that requires application code changes and significantly more configuration management.
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