Amazon is releasing new products & services to it’s global cloud compute network at a rate that has all of our heads spinning.
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Here’s new stuff worth mentioning around databases & data.
1. For ETL — AWS GLUE
Moving data from your transactional MySQL or Arora database to your reporting database isn’t always easy.
In the past you could use a service like xplenty or Alooma.
Now Amazon themselves are getting into the ETL game, providing a new service called Glue.
Also: RDS or Mysql? 10 use cases
2. Query S3 with Athena
Chances are if you’re using AWS for anything, you’ve got data in S3. And wouldn’t it be nice to pick that apart and dig through it, where it sits?
Oracle had a feature called “external tables” and MySQL had something similar. Now Amazon is offering that native within it’s own cloud universe. Thanks to some tricky lambda code, now you can do that. Don’t worry how they did it, because it’s been packaged into a nice easy service for your use!
Related: When you have to take the fall — consulting war stories
3. Business Intelligence with QuickSight
If you’re a data driven startup, and who isn’t these days, you’re going to have a business unit building reports. Tableau or Looker may be in your wheelhouse.
Amazon is obviously seeing the opportunity here, and competing with their own partners. Check out Amazon Quicksight for details.
Read: Is upgrading RDS like a sh*t storm that will not end?
4. Expanded RDS
RDS is obviously a very popular offering. And even though zero downtime is very hard to achieve with RDS, you’ll save plenty on DBAs and admins you don’t have to hire!
If you hadn’t heard, there is now MariaDB support. And with it, there’s a migration from MySQL to Mariadb as well.
Using Mariadb may bring you performance advantages & improvements. But RDS may mitigate this by productize & standarizing things.
You can also now move encrypted snapshots across regions. In my view this isn’t really a new feature, but rather fixing something that was broken before. The previous limitation was really more a symptom of their global network of data centers, than any built feature per se.
Also: Is the difference between dev & ops a four-letter word?
5. Expanded Redshift
As I’ve blogged before, everybody is excited about Redshift these days.
Amazon has introduced some new features.
o better loading of sorted data
This is done behind the scenes to load data quickly, and keep it stored efficiently. No more vacuuming after a big load!
o user & database rate limiting
Limit connections on a per user or per database level. Useful!
o storage estimates on analyze
When you perform the analyze command, you can get storage information so it’s easier to decide datatypes & compression type. Nifty!
Also: Is Redshift outpacing Hadoop as the big data warehouse for startups?
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Originally published at Scalable Startups.
