Amazon adds new features to Aurora database
Amazon on Tuesday announced it's added two new features to Aurora, its MySQL-compatible relational database, as part of its ongoing effort to make AWS Services work together.
It's added the ability to invoke Lambda functions, allowing customers to connect Aurora to other AWS services, as well as the ability load data from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) directly into Aurora.
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources. AWS users can now write stored procedures in Aurora to invoke Lambda functions. For instance, a user could exploit this to send email using Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), issue a notification using Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) or update a Amazon DynamoDB table. It can also be used at the application level to implement complex ETL jobs and workflows, track and audit actions on database tables, and perform advanced performance monitoring and analysis.
The second new feature allows data from an S3 bucket to be imported directly into Aurora. Previously, users had to copy the data to an EC2 instance and then import it. The data can come from any AWS region accessible from the user's Aurora cluster.
As Amazon eats into Oracle's database business, Oracle CTO Larry Ellison has taken note. At Oracle OpenWorld last month, he slammed the Aurora database for lacking features, and he slammed AWS overall for vendor lock-in.