Basic Questions about Amazon RDS, S3 Storage, and Default RDS Tables

Question

I just created my first database instance on the Amazon RDS service. I was wondering...

1) Is there a way to have Amazon automatically back up my data in a way that it persists even if the instance is deleted?

2) Is it possible to share tables across multiple instances?

3) When I first connected to the instance, I found there were three databases: the one I specifically created, innob, and mysql. Should I continue using the one I created or one of the others? Are there cost implications?

THANK YOU.

Answer 1

1) Is there a way to have Amazon automatically back up my data in a way that it persists even if the instance is deleted?

Yes, Amazon can automatically backup your data

Amazon RDS can automatically back up all of your DB Instances. You can set the backup parameters when you create a DB Instance. However, if you don't set the backup retention period, Amazon RDS sets a default period for you. You can modify the backup parameters whenever you want.

See here

Also, there are DB snapshots which are are user-initiated backups of a DB Instance. DB Snapshots are retained until they are deleted by the user. See here.

2) Is it possible to share tables across multiple instances?

Yes, the instances must be in the same security group.

3) When I first connected to the instance, I found there were three databases: the one I specifically created, innob, and mysql.

The innodb and mysql tables are needed for mysql to run. You should use the one you created.

Answer 2

You can use MySQl commands mysqlimport (import) and mysqldump (export) against Amazon RDS. IIRC Imports are limited to 1GB

Answer 3

TFD: Imports are not limited to 1GB. However, aws recommends that if you are importing more than 1g, you should import tables separately from flatfiles, rather than monolithically piped in from mysqldump.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=2933

Answer 4

Few other Good to know things about RDS

• For security reasons we can not migrate Db instances from inside VPC to outside VPC.
• We can migrate Db instances which is not in VPC to VPC.
• I/O operations are suspended on all RDS instances(including Read Replica's) for the duration of snapshots.
• Aurora replica's become normal Db instances in case of failover, where as normal RDS instances do not support this.
• RDS instances in multi AZ are used for Disaster recovery purpose only not to boost read performance.
• So as to boost read performance we should have read replica's.
• AWS doesn't charge for replicating from primary to secondary RDS instance.
• Redshift is used for OLAP transactions and has columnar storage.
• Dynamo Db offers push button scaling, i.e. no downtime for scaling. Whereas thats not true for other RDS instances.
• DMS - Data migration service can be used to migrate any db to AWS. AWS will take care of all the complexities.