What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?

They could provide better integration for the solution with Microsoft products. Although this may be challenging due to competitive interests, enhanced integration could significantly benefit users working with mixed technology environments.

As a customer of Amazon RDS, you don't have super-user privileges, and that is the only drawback where improvements are required. I never tested the scalability of the product. I was scaling it up to two, three, and four gigabytes, and it was fine. I don't know how it fares when we are loading hundreds of gigabytes of terabytes of data. Redshift can manage huge amounts of data, but I don't know about Amazon RDS. I suspect Amazon RDS can handle huge amounts of data because Postgres is very capable of doing so. Amazon RDS in AWS is simply an umbrella. Underneath Amazon RDS, you can choose to implement MySQL or other databases. The implementation I always chose was Postgres.

The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I like using Amazon RDS because it offers quick operations for me. However, there are times when understanding how to use some of the services can be challenging, even with documentation. If I could add a feature, I'd improve navigation for related services.

One notable improvement that could enhance the database management experience, particularly during migration scenarios, is the accessibility of the root user. Currently, challenges arise when attempting continuous migration or transferring data between cloud platforms like AWS RDS and GCP Cloud. Another potential improvement suggestion is reconsidering the policy of locking down root user access entirely. Instead, it could be beneficial to allow access to higher-level administrators or designated personnel within a company. This approach ensures that not everyone has access to the root user. Still, at least those with administrative roles can perform essential tasks such as making changes or taking a database dump for on-premise storage.

The solution's version upgrade and performance could be improved.

The shortcomings stem from not Amazon RDS as a product but are related to its monitoring capabilities. I feel Amazon RDS should have a lot of functionalities to make monitoring within the database easier. Amazon RDS should provide more granularity of log entries.

The product must add more older versions of the database engines.

Amazon RDS needs to have an overall dashboard where I can view all the tables in the form of pie charts and Gantt charts. The deployment is complex, and we would like to see automated scripts. It needs to incorporate performance insights.

The running cost could be improved.

There are a few aspects of database management that have room for improvement. There are a few parameters in the solution that are a bit unclear at our end as it's not understandable. So, for queries, they show them as other stuff which is not clearly mentioned. For the legends which they are giving, there should be some other help that could help us with the legends on the graphs.

The solution could improve by adding a sandbox environment and more security.

We don't have control over tweaking the database parameters, so we switched to Aurora. In the next release, it would be great to have access to core parameters to improve or tweak the performance.

To save costs, I need to shut down my server. However, Amazon has a policy of automatically restarting the server every seven days. This means that I have to repeatedly shut down the server to avoid incurring extra expenses.

I would like to see improvements in the tool's automatic restart.

Amazon RDS could improve by having more sophisticated. I use other solutions that have better technology for more difficult tasks.

In the next release, it would be great to see RDS provide connection pooling out of the box.

An RDS account cannot be shared when you close it. You need an encryption key to clone the data, but you cannot share it.

In terms of what needs to be improved, I am unable to provide appropriate feedback because we are still familiarizing ourselves with the solution. Some of the documents that I have seen also state that Amazon previously supported MS SQL, which is great, but we are going into the database areas of PostgreSQL and MySQL. With my limited experience, I have noticed that documentation management could be improved. It could be better.

Concerning performance, when a cluster upgrades from lower to upper config, the connection drops. This could be solved by better coding and settings and included in the next release. It's supposed to be scalable, but we don't feel that. True, there won't be any drops. The solution they gave was to maintain our cluster at a level sufficient for our peak load. However, that will probably defeat the whole purpose of on-demand scalability. So that is certainly where we might need to rethink the solution. It actually works in real-time, but it's not at a level where we can think of five seconds or 10 seconds there.

If you are a very tech-savvy guy who is a DBA, there are certain limitations due to how it's been implemented. You cannot do a lot of platform-level changes if that's how it's been set up, however, it's not required actually. Those limitations have not stopped anything, not stopped us from doing anything. That said, someone more technical may not like the limitations. Platform-level changes are not allowed. The solution is a bit expensive.

The security features could be improved.

Expecting to have AWS RDS custom.

The solution needs RDS Mysql support for both MySQL 8 and MariaDB. The Performance Monitor they have is a little clanky, at least in regards to the UI. I wish they had designed a better MySQL Monitoring solution. I personally like SolarWinds DPA. The performance is not always as good as MySQL running on its own EC2 instance. I have done some benchmarks before between EC2 instances and RDS and EC2 were better. Being unable to select Out-file is annoying. They do support select Out-files into S3 but only on Aurora. It would be nice if they had implemented that feature in RDS MySQL.

It would be better if it integrated seamlessly with Microsoft products. Our clients use the Microsoft Tally application server. We already tried to create a reputation, for example, an on-premises environment from our client to Amazon RDS using the Microsoft Tally server. But we couldn't do that because we didn't have a strong user in RDS. We couldn't create a reputation from an on-premises environment from the Microsoft Tally server to RDS. I think that it would be a good implementation, and it would help us with this case.

When you are using it for the first time, it is a little bit hard to configure. The first-time configuration is not very easy. It should be easier to configure. Its installation should also be simpler. Currently, its installation is very complex. With SQL Server, we have access to the SQL Server analysis services and reporting services, but such services are not available with Amazon RDS.

The price could be better. We have better options like Microsoft Azure to use in the cloud. I also don't think it's very scalable.

The only thing that I can say is, you have to be really careful about the Cloud provision plannings - meaning that you should calculate the cost carefully due to the fact that the bill is increased sharply if you increase the limit. You have to provision what you need per month. The solution charges for technical support, which is something they should change, at least for those organizations on tier one.

The Amazon RDS engine could provide features for additional databases, such as Db2. It could also provide support for other databases, such as NoSQL databases, DynamoDB, and Apache Cassandra. They could all stay under one hood. Another improvement that Amazon could do is to market their product so that more customers can use it. With Microsoft having its own cloud Azure hosting SQL Server databases and Oracle coming up with its own cloud, there appears to be more competition. As more customers move to Amazon cloud, it will increase the utilization of the RDS, then more customers will be able to harness the power of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

The fact that it is fully managed has some disadvantages, as well. I have worked on SQL Server, Oracle, and other RDBMS systems for more than 20 years. In many of these cases, I have been an administrator and required administrative privileges to perform many of the tasks that I did. As I now work on a fully managed and maintained database, it is taking me longer to figure out how to perform these same operations that I was used to doing on-premises. Essentially, having a great deal of experience as an RDBMS administrator has made it harder for me to move forward when working on a database that is fully managed. It would be helpful if they made it easier to migrate from an existing on-premises solution to the cloud-based service. Technical support could use some improvement.

A lot of the features are disabled by default. The solution should enable more features. I understand this could cause challenges to management for many clients using RDS, however.