Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) offers cloud-based relational database management. It’s part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Amazon manages its many services for businesses that pay for cloud data storage in a relational database. Relational databases are one of the most popular databases. In a relational database, as its name suggests, pieces of data are all related in some way to each other. A relational database has both a logical and a physical structure. The logical structure is how the data is organized by relationship (how the data structures all connect or have things in common, often displayed in a table), and the physical structure is where the data is actually stored in the database.
Relational databases store enormous amounts of data that would be hard to find if the database did not have a stored procedure feature, which makes it easier to request a data structure and find it quickly in a database table.
Amazon RDS features
Amazon’s cloud relational database offerings include support for six popular database engines:
- MySQL
- Oracle
- Microsoft SQL
- MariaDB
- Amazon Aurora
- PostgreSQL
Amazon RDS offers the following services:
- Taking care of administrative tasks for hardware and software
- Allowing clients to control user permissions (who can perform what actions in the database)
- Scaling storage space if more data is added
- Encrypting data in some of the database engines
- Providing solid state drive (SSD) data storage
- Monitoring database activity and metrics of system performance
