Understanding core components in Amazon Aurora DSQL - Amazon Aurora DSQL

Amazon Aurora DSQL is provided as a Preview service. To learn more, see Betas and Previews in the AWS Service Terms.

Understanding core components in Amazon Aurora DSQL

To learn about the core components in Aurora DSQL, review the following:

Distributed architecture

Aurora DSQL is based on a novel distributed database that is composed of four multi-tenant components:

  • Relay and connectivity

  • Compute and databases

  • Transaction log, concurrency control, and isolation

  • User storage

A control plane coordinates all of these. Each of these components provide redundancy across three Availability Zones (AZs), with automatic cluster scaling and self-healing in case of component failures. To learn more about how this architecture supports high availability, see Resilience in Amazon Aurora DSQL.

Aurora DSQL clusters

Single-Region clusters synchronously replicate data, remove replication lag, and prevent database failovers, and make sure that data is consistent across multiple Availability Zones (AZ) or Regions. If there are infrastructure failures, Aurora DSQL automatically routes requests to healthy infrastructure without manual intervention. Aurora DSQL provides atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) transactions with strong consistency, snapshot isolation, atomicity, and cross-AZ and cross-Region durability.

Multi-Region linked clusters provide the same resilience and connectivity as single-Region clusters. However, they improve availability by offering two Regional endpoints, one in each linked cluster Region. Both endpoints of a linked cluster present a single logical database. They are available for concurrent read and write operations, and provide strong data consistency. This means that you can build applications that run in multiple Regions at the same time for performance and resilience—and know that readers will always see the same data.

Note

During preview, you can interact with clusters in us-east-1 – US East (N. Virginia) and us-east-2 – US East (Ohio).

PostgreSQL databases

The distributed database layer (compute) in Aurora DSQL is based on a current major version of PostgreSQL. You can connect to Aurora DSQL with familiar PostgreSQL drivers and tools. Aurora DSQL is currently compatible with PostgreSQL version 16 and supports a subset of PostgreSQL features, expressions, and data types. For more information about the supported SQL features, see Understanding PostgreSQL compatibility.