List of the Top 3 SQL Databases for AWS Glue in 2025

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) streamlines the creation, administration, and scaling of relational databases in the cloud. It presents a budget-friendly and flexible capacity option while handling time-consuming management activities such as hardware setup, database configuration, applying updates, and conducting backups. This enables you to focus on enhancing your applications, ensuring they deliver optimal performance, robust availability, security, and compatibility. Amazon RDS provides a variety of database instance types tailored for memory, performance, or I/O optimization and supports a range of six popular database engines, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. Furthermore, the AWS Database Migration Service simplifies the process of moving or replicating your current databases to Amazon RDS, ensuring an easy and efficient transition. Ultimately, Amazon RDS equips organizations with powerful database solutions while alleviating the complexities associated with management tasks. By choosing this service, businesses can gain more agility and focus on innovation instead of maintenance.

Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native relational database designed to work seamlessly with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, offering the high performance and reliability typically associated with traditional enterprise databases while also providing the cost-effectiveness and simplicity of open-source solutions. Its performance is notably superior, achieving speeds up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. Moreover, it combines the security, availability, and reliability expected from commercial databases, all at a remarkably lower price point—specifically, only one-tenth of the cost. Managed entirely by the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Aurora streamlines operations by automating critical tasks such as hardware provisioning, database configuration, patch management, and backup processes. This database features a fault-tolerant storage architecture that can automatically scale to support database instances as large as 64TB. Additionally, Amazon Aurora enhances performance and availability through capabilities like up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backups to Amazon S3, and data replication across three separate Availability Zones, all of which improve data resilience and accessibility. These comprehensive features not only make Amazon Aurora an attractive option for businesses aiming to harness the cloud for their database requirements but also ensure they can do so while enjoying exceptional performance and security measures. Ultimately, adopting Amazon Aurora can lead to reduced operational overhead and greater focus on innovation.

Amazon Redshift stands out as the favored option for cloud data warehousing among a wide spectrum of clients, outpacing its rivals. It caters to analytical needs for a variety of enterprises, ranging from established Fortune 500 companies to burgeoning startups, helping them grow into multi-billion dollar entities, as exemplified by Lyft. The platform is particularly adept at facilitating the extraction of meaningful insights from vast datasets. Users can effortlessly perform queries on large amounts of both structured and semi-structured data throughout their data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, utilizing standard SQL for their queries. Moreover, Redshift enables the convenient storage of query results back to an S3 data lake in open formats like Apache Parquet, allowing for further exploration with other analysis tools such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon SageMaker. Acknowledged as the fastest cloud data warehouse in the world, Redshift consistently improves its speed and performance annually. For high-demand workloads, the newest RA3 instances can provide performance levels that are up to three times superior to any other cloud data warehouse on the market today. This impressive capability establishes Redshift as an essential tool for organizations looking to optimize their data processing and analytical strategies, driving them toward greater operational efficiency and insight generation. As more businesses recognize these advantages, Redshift’s user base continues to expand rapidly.