Getting Started with Amazon Aurora DSQL - Lets Talk About Data
In this show, we dive deep into Amazon Aurora DSQL the new distributed SQL database and demonstrate how to help customers build active-active, multi-region, highly available applications. We conclude with a demonstration.
Prasad Matkar
Amazon Employee
Published Feb 28, 2025
In this episode of Let's Talk About Data, host Prasad Matkar is joined with guests Dan Blaner and Raluca Constantin and they discussed Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new distributed SQL database. The show covered how Aurora DSQL provides a truly serverless experience with automatic scaling, multi-region active-active capabilities, and strong consistency across regions. The guests explained that Aurora DSQL is PostgreSQL compatible, using the Postgres wire protocol, drivers, SQL dialect, and type system, making it familiar for developers who work with PostgreSQL. As part of the demo they demonstrated how Aurora DSQL handles distributed database operations while maintaining ACID compliance through optimistic concurrency control rather than pessimistic locking.
Key Highlights:
- Aurora DSQL offers serverless scalability with no maintenance windows or downtime
- It supports multi-region active-active deployments across two read-write regions plus a witness region
- Provides bi-directional synchronous replication between regions
- Requires no manual sharding or partition management
- Best suited for OLTP workloads with transaction timeouts at 5 minutes
- Uses optimistic concurrency control and applications may need refactoring to handle optimistic concurrency exceptions
- As best practices developers should use well-distributed primary keys (like UUIDs) rather than sequential IDs
Prasad Matkar - Database Specialist @AWS
Links from today's episode
- Introduction Blog - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-amazon-aurora-dsql/
- AWS samples - https://github.com/aws-samples/aurora-dsql-samples
- Optimistic Concurrency Control in DSQL Blog - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/concurrency-control-in-amazon-aurora-dsql/
- Getting Started Demo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH_9gg3EcT4&t=7s
- Lambda and API Gateway Integration - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGKJi2Yj6Jg
- Technical Deep Dive - https://brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12/03/aurora-dsql.html
Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.