Relational Data Stores
Relational databases are crucial for transactional systems, emphasizing the need for understanding their implementation, tuning, and migration on AWS. Key aspects include performance optimization through appropriate RDS storage types and instance classes, managing database locking to prevent contention, and utilizing AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) and AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for schema conversion and data migration. Effective monitoring and management strategies are essential to ensure high availability and minimal downtime during migrations, reinforcing the importance of structured, ACID-compliant workloads in data engineering.
Relational databases remain the backbone of transactional systems, and for the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate exam, understanding how to implement, tune, and migrate them on AWS is essential. In the previous lesson, the 3 Vs framework and storage format decisions helped narrow the landscape of data stores. Now the focus shifts to structured,
This lesson covers three pillars that the exam tests repeatedly:
Performance implementation, which involves selecting the right RDS storage type and instance class for cost and throughput requirements.
Access pattern management, which centers on database locking mechanisms that prevent data conflicts.
Schema conversion and migration using AWS SCT and AWS DMS to replatform legacy databases with minimal downtime.
Amazon RDS supports engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server, while Amazon Aurora offers an RDS-compatible, high-performance alternative. These services exist because transactional workloads demand row-level consistency and referential integrity that object stores and key-value stores cannot provide. DynamoDB and NoSQL patterns are covered in the next lesson.
The following mind map provides a structural overview of the relational data store ecosystem on AWS, anchoring every concept explored in this lesson.
This map captures the decision surface that data engineers navigate when deploying and migrating relational workloads. Each branch maps directly to a section below.
Performance implementation for RDS
Storage type selection directly determines transactional throughput and cost on Amazon RDS.
Storage types and their trade-offs
Amazon RDS offers two primary storage tiers for production workloads. General purpose SSD (gp3) delivers a baseline of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s throughput, ...