AWS Database case studies

AWS Database · Put your knowledge to work in context.

AWS Certified Database – Specialty (often referenced by its exam code, DBS-C01) is a specialty-level credential aimed at database practitioners who already work hands-on with AWS data services and want a formal way to demonstrate that depth. It is not an entry-level certification: the target candidate designs, migrates, operates, secures, and troubleshoots production database workloads on AWS across relational, key-value, document, graph, in-memory, and analytical engines. The AWS Database case studies are 5 cases and about 4,812 words.

DynamoDB Key Design Under a Flash-Sale Spike

Northwind Outfitters runs order management on a single DynamoDB table in us-east-1 holding 40 million orders and growing by roughly 250,000 per day. Three access patterns matter: fetch one order by orderId; list a customer's orders newest-first; and an operations dashboard showing every order currently in PENDING status for today.

773 words, about 4 min 2

Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL: Cutover Under a Six-Hour Freeze

MedTech Compliance Systems runs a 3.2 TB Oracle 19c EE database on EC2 supporting a claims adjudication product. The schema has 1,150 tables, 340 PL/SQL packages, 90 materialized views, and several LONG RAW and CLOB columns holding scanned documents.

1,010 words, about 5 min 3

Aurora MySQL Failover Downtime and Purge-Driven Replica Lag

Arcadia Learning runs its LMS on an Aurora MySQL 8.0 cluster: one writer (db.r6g.2xlarge) and two readers, 6 TB total, peaking at about 12,000 client connections from application servers that each maintain a 50-connection pool. After a maintenance event forced a writer failover, the application returned 500 errors for four minutes even though Aurora promoted a reader in under 30 seconds.

982 words, about 5 min 4

RDS PostgreSQL: A Nightly Job That Everyone Has Learned to Ignore

Fintrail runs RDS for PostgreSQL 15 on a db.m6i.xlarge with 400 GB of gp2 storage. A nightly reporting job starts at 02:00 and scans most of a 300 GB transactions table to build aggregates.

911 words, about 5 min 5

Cross-Account Snapshot Sharing and Credential Hygiene Under Audit

Halcyon Health has prod, analytics and dev accounts under one AWS Organization. Analytics needs a nightly read-only copy of a 2 TB Aurora PostgreSQL cluster in prod to run models.

1,136 words, about 6 min