AWS DATABASE ENGINES
Published: 2023-06-28 04:26:35

**WHAT IS A DATABASE ENGINE**
A database engine is an fundamental software that a database management system  uses  to function by  creating, reading, updating, and deleting data from the database. The database engine does the real work of organizing the information and allows you to work with tables. Database engine represents a fundamental building block of your database. 


 **AMAZON RELATIONAL DATABASE SERVICE(Amazon RDS)**
It is a managed Relational Database Service  provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that supports the most popular varieties of database engines. It is a type of database that stores data in tables with rows and columns. It also  stores and organizes large amount of data that applications can draw upon to help them perform various tasks. Relational database is provided by Amazon RDS is cost-effective with resizable capability. Amazon RDS is very useful for some ICT startups that have a functional database infrastructure already in use and are interested in the cloud technologies. 


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**DATABASE ENGINES SUPPORTED BY AMAZON RDS**
These include:
**MySQL:**  It is a free, popular and open-source relational database engine that is widely used in web applications. MySQL is one of the most popular database engines in the world. It is free and open-source. It’s commonly fast, very sturdy and can coexist with many different operating systems. 
Generally, the solutions obtained from MySQL are used for databases which requires only a straightforward read-write activities as well as strong performance. 

**Aurora:** It is one of the engines supported by Amazon RDS that is fully managed relational database engines which  works well with MySQL and PostgreSQL. It is designed to be highly scalable and available delivering fast performance with automatic backups, and failover. Unlike Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora is designed specifically for the cloud. It combines the performance and availability of customary operational databases, with the simplicity, personalized, and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

**MariaDB:** It is a fast, popular open-source relational database management system which is a scalable relational database management system that’s also an improved version of MySQL created by the original developers of MySQL. The performance is enhanced with augmented security, and more storage engines. 

**PostgreSQL:** This is a powerful advanced enterprise highly stable open-source object-relational database system that gives support to SQL. Its broad features makes it a good fit for web applications, data warehousing, and business intelligence which has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance.

**Oracle:** It is a universally used commercial relational database management system (RDBMS) engine from the American software and hardware. Various editions of Oracle, such as Oracle Standard Edition One, Oracle Standard Edition Two, and Oracle Enterprise Edition are supported by Oracles.  

**Microsoft SQL Server:** It is a commercial relational database engine developed by Microsoft which is widely used in enterprise applications for managing vast amounts of data. Amazon RDS for SQL Server makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale SQL Server deployments in the cloud. SQL server is Microsoft’s owned database engine that supports a broad variety of transactions. As with Oracle, it’s generally best suited for larger companies with massive fixed datasets who already use Microsoft SQL as a core part of their business but not a good choice for startups.


 
**USE CASES OF AMAZON RDS**
Some of the most common use cases of AWS RDS include the following:

**Web applications:** Amazon Relational Database can be used to power web applications to fulfill the needs of very demanding applications, giving them a scalable and highly accessible database backend with high throughput, massive storage scalability, and further high availability. These applications are built on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and many others.
 
**Web and mobile applications:** Amazon RDS offer a scalable and secure database solution for web and mobile apps, making it the perfect choice for businesses looking to launch apps fast and effectively.

**Mobile applications:** Amazon RDS Supports developers of mobile applications that has need for a database platform with high throughput and availability so that they can endlessly update these applications providing them a highly available, scalable database service for applications that need to store and retrieve data in real time. 
Mobile application companies can use Amazon RDS to provide a better performance, cost-effective, highly secure, and increased availability for their social and mobile games. 

**Disaster recovery:** It can be used to design, test, set up and manage standby databases and read replicas in different regions or availability zones, providing a dependable disaster recovery solution for critical applications in order to maintain business continuity.

**E-commerce:**   Amazon Relational Database System offers small, medium and large e-commerce businesses a flexible, safe, highly scalable, and cost-effective database solution for online sales and retailing. It enables the company's database to store and manage product catalogs, order histories, and customer data for e-commerce websites and applications. Using Amazon RDS can simplify administrative database tasks thereby saving time and money.
With Amazon RDS companies can add millions of new items to their database every month leading to overall customer satisfaction and sales increase. 

**Analytics and business intelligence:** It can store and manage huge volumes of data for data analysis and business intelligence applications thereby ensuring that there is a fast and reliable access to data used for reporting and analysis in business.

**DevOps:** It can be combined with other AWS services to automate database distribution and management as part of the DevOps process. 

**Travel applications:** Amazon RDS offers applications such as Airbnb a simplified time-consuming database administrative tasks and automated database replication. Mobile apps like Airbnb also take advantage of RDS' scalable storage capability.

**Streaming applications:** Applications like Netflix works with  RDS because of its storage scalability , and availability of Amazon RDS, which allows them to handle high demand daily.

**Data warehousing:** Amazon RDS offers a scalable and safe data warehousing solution to businesses that needs to store and analyze very large volumes of data in the cloud.