
Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness - Zenfinch
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-parallel-read-ahead-faster-indexing-numa-awareness/
======
cookiecaper
We've switched 6 or 7 of our production databases to Aurora now. It is _much_
faster than MySQL/Percona Server. Even highly optimized MySQL installs with
FusionIO cards struggled to keep up before we switched to Aurora.

Aurora is expensive, but it's a huge instant speedup and easily worth the cost
for anyone with a production application that occasionally hits performance
limitations on traditional MySQL.

That said, it is based on MySQL 5.6.10, so we are missing some features like
online DDL from 5.6.17. Many bugs from 5.6.10 have been resolved upstream but
are still present in Aurora. [0] It's also subject to the usual limitations of
RDS (no SUPER, no access to the binary database files, no innobackupex).

[0] [https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/11/16/amazon-aurora-
lookin...](https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/11/16/amazon-aurora-looking-
deeper/)

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ralusek
Cool, although I sure wish they had gone with Postgres. I can't live without
the occasional JSONB anymore.

I know MySQL has made some half-hearted attempts to make headway on this
front, but it has completely changed the way I model certain parts of my data.

~~~
s0l1dsnak3123
I second this. I'd switch over from RDS to Aurora in a heartbeat if AWS built
a postgres frontend for it.

~~~
craigkerstiens
Curious what is the key feature of Aurora on Postgres that you'd want?

~~~
rch
PostGIS compatibility.

Unless you mean that the other way around, in which case I don't know what key
features of Aurora I'm missing (besides price & performance).

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ngrilly
Aurora being a closed-source fork of MySQL is a real problem in my opinion.

Look at all the comments here about new features and bug fixes introduced
upstream but missing in 5.6.10 (online DDL, JSON, etc.).

We already have Oracle's MySQL, MariaDB, WebScaleSQL, MyRocks (Facebook's
MySQL with RocksDB and DocStore), Percona Server for MySQL, and now Aurora.
Each version has its own features and peculiarities. The ecosystem is too much
scattered.

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morgo
For context: Faster indexing and numa awareness is in MySQL 5.7. The parallel
read-ahead is a Facebook patch.

Aurora is based on MySQL 5.6.

~~~
timdorr
So is Aurora just a MySQL storage engine (e.g., InnoDB), or a modified version
of MySQL under the hood?

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Zenfinch
It's api is based on mysql, doesn't share interals with it.

They had a deep dive into during the last re:invent.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwWFrZGMDds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwWFrZGMDds)

~~~
morgo
Sure it does. You can see this from diagnostic commands (Innodb status,
mutexes etc)

~~~
Zenfinch
Really? Werner Vogels said they built a totally different logging and storage
layer.

Also a good bit of video of Vogels talking about Aurora.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPpCnFE-
hU&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPpCnFE-
hU&feature=youtu.be&t=35m20s)

~~~
morgo
Logging and storage being new does not mean it does not share a lot of other
internals.

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malloryerik
Do you think that Aurora is a reason to start a new project with MySQL instead
of Postgres? (Aurora starts at r3.large instances.)

~~~
ngrilly
I'm not sure. compose.com, among others, offers PostgreSQL hosting with auto-
scaling. But I ignore if they can match Aurora with 64 TB databases.

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pmontra
MySQL compatible means that moving from MySQL to Aurora is transparent to the
application, included all the MySQL (InnoDB?) peculiarities, which many regard
as bugs?

This could be really important because some applications end up relying on
MySQL oddities even with good willed developers.

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ksec
Any Equivalent for Postgre?

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dhd415
CitusDB is an option for scaling out PostgreSQL workloads, but it's not a
direct equivalent to Aurora. That's both good and bad in different ways. E.g.,
it's good that CitusDB is not a fork of PostgreSQL as Aurora is a fork of
MySQL. It's bad that CitusDB as pure software can't offer the same kind of
high-performance, auto-replicated storage layer that Aurora does.

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zmanian
I remember Ed Kemmet saying that NUMA optimizations are patent encumbered and
presumably licensed. Probably part of the reason this is closed source.

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n00b101
Does this support column-oriented database designs?

~~~
brianwawok
It's still MySQL

