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On 2026-07-16 AWS put PostgreSQL 19 Beta 2 in RDS Preview. Our first-party REPACK CONCURRENTLY run cut an 873 MB bloated table to 429 MB in 4.5s with 60/60 concurrent SELECTs succeeding.
Aurora bills instance hours plus storage plus I/O — or storage at a 125% premium with I/O bundled (I/O-Optimized). Serverless v2 at $0.12 per ACU-hour wins on variable workloads, loses on steady traffic above 4 ACU. Global Database doubles the price per secondary region plus replicated-write fees. Backtrack adds per-change-record cost most teams never factor in.
DynamoDB on-demand bills $1.25 per million writes and $0.25 per million reads — pay-per-request convenience with no capacity planning. Provisioned at $0.00065/WCU-hour wins on steady traffic above ~50% utilization. Every GSI doubles the write cost, IA tier cuts storage 60% but adds 25% to request fees, and Global Tables compound the bill per region.
Why Aurora PostgreSQL loves B-tree indexes on OLTP but DynamoDB feels like an LSM—and how cost-based optimization surprises you when statistics go stale on RDS.
Too many "too many connections" pages are fixed by raising max_connections—which trades one outage for OOM on the writer. This guide traces deadlocks, pool sizing, RDS Proxy, and prepared statement caching on Aurora.
Serializable sounds safest until your checkout times out under row locks. This guide maps READ COMMITTED, REPEATABLE READ, and SERIALIZABLE to RDS/Aurora defaults—and when DynamoDB conditional writes are the BASE alternative.
Autovacuum cannot keep up after Black Friday bulk deletes—and your BRIN index is not helping point lookups. Vacuum strategy on Aurora, plus Aurora Limitless and DynamoDB hot key mitigation.
July 2026 field note: Aurora failover windows still force app timeouts above tens of seconds; DynamoDB hot partitions and short transactions remain the scaling levers — with a partition-math worksheet you can reproduce.
RDS performance: gp3 IOPS, Performance Insights / Database Insights, Proxy, replicas, ElastiCache. July 2026 tuning checklist.
RDS, Aurora, and self-managed Postgres each have a cost breakeven point. This guide covers total cost of ownership, connection pooling with PgBouncer, indexing strategies, and the edge cases that turn Postgres into a billing surprise.
Atlas vs EC2 vs DocumentDB on AWS — TCO flips with DBA time, not $/vCPU. July 2026: index/cache pressure, hot shards, DocumentDB API-compat caveat.
Single-table design is either DynamoDB's superpower or a six-month rewrite waiting to happen. SaaS access patterns, tenant isolation, GSI strategies, and the patterns that make DynamoDB the right serverless database for multi-tenant apps — plus the patterns that get teams in trouble.