This will be a continuation of part one. If you haven’t read the first article please click here to read it and then come back, as there is a lot of introductory information missing here. As a quick recap, we established there are usually two types of databases you’ll run into in the wild, relational database (SQL) or non-relational databases (NoSQL). We spoke of the pros and cons of both and what AWS brings to the space. In this article, we'll look at the last of what Amazon offers for databases with a few options that don't fall quite into either category.
Amazon RedShift
What is it and what does it do?
Redshift is a powerful cost-effective data warehouse that can handle petabyte-scale data and is fast and fully managed by Amazon. You can use it to analyze all your data. Amazon Redshift can analyze both structured and semi-structured data with the SQL language. You can enable streamlined data ingestion with no code necessary and automate data pipelines that can ingest streaming data or automatically into Amazon S3 files. It also provides native integration into Amazon SageMaker to train ML models in your data warehouse. Redshift provides provisioned and serverless options.
Use Case:
Collaborate and share data.
Data warehouse
Automatically create, train, and deploy machine learning models for predictive insights.
Optimize your business intelligence.
Cost: AWS provides varied prices depending on your needs.
Amazon QLDB
What is it and what does it do?
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database is AWS's immutable, cryptographically verifiable log of data changes owned by a central trusted authority fully managed by Amazon. QLDB is a solution to having to build your own ledger with this new type of database. It can’t be overwritten or altered and is immutable. It keeps track of transactions with an immutable transactional log called a Journal. And of course, it works with Amazon IAM.
Use Case:
Store financial transactions.
Centralize digital records.
Reconcile supply chain systems.
Cost: you pay only for what you use with no minimum fees or mandatory service usage
Amazon Keyspaces
What is it and what does it do?
If you're familiar with Apache Cassandra then Amazon Keyspaces maybe the service for you. Keyspaces is an Apache Cassandra compatible databases service. Using Keyspaces, you don’t have to provision, patch, or manage servers. Keyspaces use the CQL language and Cassandra-type databases are very different from relational databases. For example, there is no JOIN statement so that must be factored in from the beginning. Data is stored as key-value pairs in partitions on disk. A partition key is determining how many partitions you have and how they’re distributed. The clustering column portion is optional and determines how the data is clustered and sorted. You can access Keyspaces with Apache Cassandra Query Language (CQL) API.
Use Case:
Move your Cassandra workloads to the cloud.
Build applications that require low latency.
Build applications using open-source technologies.
Cost: Cost is based on the two capacity modes, provisioned or on-demand. On-demands you only pay for reads and writes. Provisioned optimizes the price of throughput. Keyspaces also charges for data storage standard internet data transfer fees.
Amazon Timestream
What is it and what does it do?
Amazon Timestream is a serverless time series database service. Time series or time-stamped data is a sequence of data points measured over time intervals. Amazon Timestream helps you identify trends and patterns in your data with built-in time series analytics functions. Timestream provides autoscaling and simplifies the data lifecycle management. Your data is always encrypted, durable and highly available.
Use Case:
Tracking user interaction with an application over time.
Storage and analysis of industrial telemetry to streamline equipment management and maintenance.
Storage and analysis of IoT sensor data.
Monitoring metrics to improve the performance and availability of your applications.
Cost: Pay for what you use.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this covers all the database services offered by Amazon AWS for the cloud. Many in this article were more unique and specialized. This was a brief overview, and you’ll need to see the documentation for further study. Subscribe to be notified about future articles and tutorials.