A great, scalable, transactional engine
January 15, 2019

A great, scalable, transactional engine

Kyle Reichelt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Relational Database Service

My organization has, since the beginning, utilized RDS as our transactional, day-to-day database, at first staging all incoming data in a PostgreSQL. Although it has performed so well that it now handles all of our data warehousing and has handled our heaviest queries with enviable aplomb. We had initially staged data in RDS for migration into Redshift, but have determined that running well-optimized queries on our particular volume of data--certainly not the petabytes that would justify Redshift--our PostrgreSQL database on RDS is actually more performant.
  • Security... being in the AWS stack, you get all the "warm and fuzzies" that come with knowing your data is secure. And user management couldn't be easier.
  • Flexibility... Aurora, PostreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server--RDS can run any of them.
  • Scalability... when all else fails, add more hardware! To a point... and there is a point (see: petabytes) at which you might consider bumping up to RedShift, but for the other 99.99%, RDS is the place to be.
  • My engineers would be able to speak more thoroughly to the cons. I have only benefited from the fruit of their labor. I can say that, from a Project Management standpoint (interfacing with RDS via a PostgreSQL client and my dashboards), it has only performed well so far.
  • Switching back to RDS from Redshift has made my BI Dashboards much more performant (though again, we're not dealing with data in the magnitudes that justify the Redshift toolset).
  • It has decreased our tech debt. Engineering has been much more straight forward.
  • Our uptime has been improved by removing unnecessary data migration processes.
The only direct comparison that I have professionally would be from a past life where we ran Microsoft SQL Server on Microsoft Servers, and while I served as a technical liaison between a vendor and my customers, there were constant issues within my customers' technical teams when it came to resource management and scaling. I'm happy to not have that headache.

MongoDB isn't really a direct comparison to RDS (and arguably to PostgreSQL)... but I'm happy to be back with my nice, logical, relational database!
RDS is well suited if:
  1. You have a modest budget. If I were completely bootstrapped and not married to AWS, I might look elsewhere.
  2. You need a speedy, secure transactional, do-it-all database.
  3. You need the ability to scale seamlessly.