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Amazon RDS

AWS managed relational database service running PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2 on provisioned DB instances.

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Updated 6 criteria comparedSources last checked

Category
Managed databases
Free tier
Not documented
Entry paid plan
Not documented
Regions
Not documented
01.

Who it suits.

Teams already inside AWS, where the database sitting in the same VPC as everything else is worth more than any single feature on this page. Six engines, up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery, and read replicas you create and delete yourself.

Consider something else if…

You want a database per pull request. RDS documents no branching, and replicas are manual — AWS states outright that it does not autoscale them.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

02.

What the documentation says.

Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria Amazon RDS does not publish are not listed.

Execution

Managed connection pooling

Supported

Sources (1) →
  • Amazon RDS Proxy — Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide ↗

    “By using Amazon RDS Proxy, you can allow your applications to pool and share database connections to improve their ability to scale. [...] RDS Proxy establishes a database connection pool and reuses connections in this pool. [...] For RDS DB instances in replication configurations, you can associate a proxy only with the writer DB instance, not a read replica.”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs

Data

Engine

PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2. Each engine is a separate RDS product with its own version list and its own feature support, so a capability documented for one is not a capability of RDS as a whole.

Sources (1) →

Connection limit

Not a fixed number: RDS for PostgreSQL sets max_connections by formula from the instance's memory — LEAST({DBInstanceClassMemory/9531392}, 5000) — so a bigger instance class gets more connections and the ceiling is 5,000 however large it is. The parameter can be set by hand anywhere from 6 to 262,143, which is a limit on what you may configure rather than what an instance will serve. Other engines use different divisors: MySQL is memory/12582880 with no cap.

Sources (1) →

Point-in-time recovery

Any point inside the configured backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Transaction logs are uploaded to S3 every five minutes, which is what bounds how close to now the latest restorable time can be.

Sources (1) →

Read replicas

Supported — 15 per primary, raisable on request

Sources (1) →

Backup retention

Between 0 and 35 days, set per DB instance; 0 disables automated backups entirely. The default depends on how the instance was created — one day via the API or CLI, seven days via the console — so there is no single default to quote. Multi-AZ DB clusters cannot be set below 1 day.

Sources (1) →
  • Backup retention period — Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide ↗

    “If you create a DB instance using the Amazon RDS API or the AWS CLI and if you don't set the backup retention period, the default backup retention period is one day. If you create a DB instance using the console, the default backup retention period is seven days. [...] You can set the backup retention period of a DB instance to between 0 and 35 days. Setting the backup retention period to 0 disables automated backups. For a Multi-AZ DB cluster, you can set the backup retention period to between 1 and 35 days.”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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Amazon RDS in the news

Headlines from other publications, not checked by us · collected

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