AWS has recently announced that Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational Database built for the Cloud, now supports major version 12 of PostgreSQL.
PostgreSQL is an open-source object-relational database system that uses and extends the SQL language. AWS offers a PostgreSQL-compatible database as a fully-managed service with Amazon Aurora and now brings support for version 12 after previously providing support for minor versions 11.7, 10.12, and 9.6.17. This new version includes better index management, improved partitioning capabilities, and executing JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications. Furthermore, it also enables nondeterministic collations that support case-insensitive and accent-insensitive comparisons for ICU-provided collations, most common-value statistics for improved query plans, creation of generated columns that compute values with an expression, and many additional features.
The release with version 12 support also updates extensions including Address_standardizer, Address_standardizer_data_us, Amcheck, Citext, Hll, Hstore, Ip4r, Pg_repack, Pg_stat_statements, Pgaudit, Pglogical, Pgrouting, Plv8, Postgis, Postgis_tiger_geocoder, Postgis_topology.
In addition to the announcement of support of version 12 of PostgreSQL for Amazon Aurora, customers can also perform an in-place upgrade of your Amazon Aurora database cluster from PostgreSQL major version 11 to 12. Instead of a backup and restore to the new version, customers can upgrade with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console or using the AWS SDK or CLI.
AWS also offers Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which also supports the PostgreSQL database engine next to MySQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, and Oracle. However, as Ismail Egilmez, business development manager at Thundra, explains in his blog:
Amazon Aurora improves on the performance of standard MySQL by 5x and improves on standard PostgreSQL by 2x, with the same hardware configuration. Furthermore, backups are continuous, incremental backups that do not affect database performance, up to 15 read replicas are supported, and failover is done fully automatically with no data loss. It also supports creating a highly available database cluster with synchronous replication across multiple availability zones.
And lastly, he writes:
Aurora is generally more expensive than RDS for the same workloads. RDS is priced based on the type and size of the instance and EBS volume. Aurora pricing is mainly based on instance size, and storage is billed according to actual usage.
Furthermore, AWS is not the only cloud provider offering a managed relational database service compatible with PostgreSQL. Microsoft has Azure Database for PostgreSQL and, according to their documentation, supports the community version of PostgreSQL 9.5, 9,6, 10, and 11, while the in preview Flexible Server supports 11 and 12. Also, Google offers a managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server called Cloud SQL, which supports versions 9.5, 9,6, 10, 11, 12, and 13. Other available fully-managed Databases as a Service in the Cloud, such as Heroku Postgres, also support version 12.
More details on Amazon Aurora are available on the documentation landing page. Furthermore, the in-place feature and PostgreSQL version 12 support are available in all regions supported by Aurora PostgreSQL.
