Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is one of the many web services offered with AWS. Amazon RDS makes the job of database administrators easier – aiding to setup, operate, and scale the database and deployments. RDS is a great platform for DBAs who are looking to spend less time on traditional tasks like platform work, security policy provisions, performance monitoring and database handling. This frees up time to focus on developing an application.
RDS supports DB engines such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and Oracle. If you now have an Oracle database and are planning to move to cloud, RDS will help you deploy within minutes. You won’t lose any of your capabilities or features and will gain flexible capacity at a low cost. You can also migrate any applications or tools that use Oracle databases. RDS is improving constantly, with the primary goal of making its platform easier for DBAs.
Without further adieu, here are the new features added to RDS for Oracle in 2019.
Supports a new version of SQLTXPLAIN (SQLT)
SQLT is an Oracle tool that helps identify and troubleshoot performance of SQL Statements. Oracle SQLT delivers a report that includes statistics, execution plan, optimizer performance and other details that can help tune SQL queries. RDS for Oracle now supports 12.2.180725 version of SQLTXPLAIN.
Supports db.z1d and db.t3 DB instance classes
Z1d are the latest generation of instance classes optimized for memory intensive applications. They offer both high compute capacity and high memory footprint.
T3 instances are the next generation low cost burstable general-purpose instance type that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. T3 instances are designed for applications with moderate CPU usage that experience temporary spikes in use.
Oracle RDS now supports for the Z1d and T3 instance families.
Supports Oracle APEX versions 19.1.v1 ,18.1.v1 and 18.2.v1
APEX (Application Express) is a low code browser-based development platform that helps developers to build applications that can be deployed anywhere. 11.1, 12.1 and 12.2 versions of Oracle in RDS now support 19.1, 18.1, and 18.2 versions of Oracle APEX.
Supports Amazon S3 integration
Oracle RDS now supports integration with S3 for data ingress and egress. This integration support easy, efficient and secure data transfer between Oracle RDS and S3. Before this integration support, data transfer from S3 to Oracle RDS required an additional DB instance and a networking link between the two instances.
Supports Read Replicas
Oracle RDS supports Read replicas with Active Data Guard. Oracle RDS makes it easy to create replicas within the same region. The Primary DB instance manages the configuration of Active Data Guard and has a secure communication between the replica instances.
Supports RMAN DBA tasks
Oracle RDS supports Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) DBA tasks. Using Amazon RDS package rdsadmin.rdsadmin_rman_util, database backups can be performed to disk. rdsadmin.rdsadmin_rman_util package supports full and incremental database file backups, tablespace backups, and archive log backups.
Support for 64 TiB of storage and 80k IOPS
Maximum Storage of Oracle has now been increased to 64 TiB. Oracle RDS also supports a provisioned IOPS performance of 80,000 IOPS. Any existing databases can be scaled up to 64 TiB without any downtime. With this increased limit, you can consolidate your database shards into a single database instance.
Amazon RDS Performance Insights Counters
Performance Insights is an advanced performance monitoring tool for database workloads. Additional Counter Metrics are now supported for AWS Oracle RDS. Counter Metrics allows customizing the Performance Insights dashboard with 10 additional graphs.
Amazon RDS Performance Insights Supports Viewing More SQL Text
Performance Insights for Oracle RDS now supports 1024 bytes of SQL text to be shown for each row in Top Load Items. The earlier limit was 500 Bytes.
