Amazon has announced improvements for developers at its recent Re:Invent conference. These fall into a number of areas, and here we look at those concerned with database.

The improvements for working with databases on Amazon start with a way of writing serverless SQL queries against data stored in Amazon S3 object storage. To use it you point Athena at some data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), identify your fields, run your queries, and get the results - in seconds according to the developers. You pay only for the queries that you run. Behind the scenes, Athena parallelizes your query, and spreads it out across hundreds or thousands of cores.

Athena is based on the  open source Presto distributed SQL engine and can query data in formats including JSON, CSV, log files, text with custom delimiters, Apache Parquet, and Apache ORC.

A second announcement at Re:Invent was a new version of Amazon Aurora, Amazon's high performance MySQL-compatible database. The developers at Amazon have now announced Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. This is in preview, and will provide high durability, high availability, and the ability to quickly create and deploy read replicas while being PostgreSQL compatible. PostgreSQL has achieved great popularity over its long lifetime, and the Aurora edition will include support for PostgreSQL's geospatial objects.

Other database services previewed at the conference include an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) service called AWS Glue that will be available for connecting to Amazon data stores and JDBC-compliant databases; and AWS Snowmobile, an exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data.

Snowmobile is a development of Snowball. This was announced last year as a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud. Snowmobile is a secure data truck that stores up to 100 PB of data and can help you to move exabytes to AWS, though the process takes weeks. Snowmobile attaches to your network and appears as a local, NFS-mounted volume..

Other news from re:Invent relates to serverless computing and build services, see New Amazon Build Services, and the new Amazon AI Services that we reported on last week.

More Information

Amazon Athena

Aurora Preview (USA Only)

Snowmobile

AWS Glue

Presto

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