AWS Unveils Aurora DSQL, a Distributed SQL Database with Unlimited Scalability

AWS has introduced Aurora DSQL, a new distributed SQL database designed for virtually unlimited scalability. This advanced database solution promises enhanced performance and flexibility for applications requiring high-demand workloads. With its ability to scale effortlessly, Aurora DSQL caters to modern data-driven enterprises, offering businesses a powerful tool to handle vast amounts of data and ensure seamless performance across a wide range of use cases.

At its re-Invent conference, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division unveiled Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless, distributed SQL database offering high availability (99.999% for multi-region availability), strong consistency, PostgreSQL compatibility, and, according to the company, “4x faster reads and writes compared to other popular distributed SQL databases.”

AWS claims Aurora DSQL will deliver significantly lower latency than Google Spanner, its closest competitor.

Interestingly, AWS emphasizes that Aurora DSQL does not use database sharding to scale the service, and it can scale reads and writes independently. The company also highlights that Aurora DSQL ensures strong consistency, guaranteeing that all regions will reflect the same data at the same time in a multi-region setup.

To ensure resilience, AWS notes that Aurora DSQL employs an active-active architecture, ensuring there’s always a standby server ready to take over. This design ensures the application remains available, enabling users to read and write to any Aurora DSQL endpoint. As a fully managed service, AWS oversees all security updates and infrastructure management.

To enable this, AWS asserts it had to “reinvent relational database transaction processing.” Typically, maintaining strong consistency across multiple regions and syncing globally distributed servers with “microsecond accuracy” is challenging. AWS achieves this by decoupling transaction processing from storage, avoiding the bottlenecks associated with traditional methods that require frequent back-and-forth communication. Instead, Aurora checks each transaction when it’s time to commit and parallelizes writes across regions upon commitment.

A key innovation is the use of the Amazon Time Sync Service to ensure each region processes commits in the correct order. This service equips every EC2 instance with precise reference clocks synchronized with GPS atomic clocks, ensuring accurate time synchronization.

This precise time synchronization solves several data consistency issues and speeds up processing. While time-based approaches might seem intuitive, achieving global clock synchronization is a difficult problem, which is why traditional databases haven't used time this way. However, with advancements from companies like Clockwork, this synchronization is now possible, enabling database innovations like Aurora DSQL.

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Source: Techcrunch