Simon Willison’s Weblog

Introducing Amazon Aurora DSQL (via) New, weird-shaped database from AWS. It's (loosely) PostgreSQL compatible, claims "virtually unlimited scale" and can be set up as a single-region cluster or as a multi-region setup that somehow supports concurrent reads and writes across all regions. I'm hoping they publish technical details on how that works at some point in the future, right now they just say this:

When you create a multi-Region cluster, Aurora DSQL creates another cluster in a different Region and links them together. Adding linked Regions makes sure that all changes from committed transactions are replicated to the other linked Regions. Each linked cluster has a Regional endpoint, and Aurora DSQL synchronously replicates writes across Regions, enabling strongly consistent reads and writes from any linked cluster.

Here's the list of unsupported PostgreSQL features - most notably views, triggers, sequences, foreign keys and extensions. A single transaction can also modify only up to 10,000 rows.

No pricing information yet (it's in a free preview) but it looks like this one may be true scale-to-zero, unlike some of their other recent "serverless" products - Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 has a baseline charge no matter how heavily you are using it. (Update: apparently that changed on 20th November 2024 when they introduced an option to automatically pause a v2 serverless instance, which then "takes less than 15 seconds to resume".)