You have your database instance deployed with AWS and you are using AWS RDS for MySQL. All work smoothly in terms of satisfying queries for your application and delivering reliable uptime and performance. Now you need to take care of your backup strategy. Business is defined to have this retention policy:

• 7 daily full backups
• 4 weekly backups
• 12 monthly backups

Plus the ability to do point-in-time recovery (PITR) for the last 24 hours since the last full backup was taken.

The cloud vendor solution

This is a piece of cake. The daily backups: just set the backup retention period to six days. Done. This also has the plus that PITR is already covered since RDS uploads the transaction logs to S3 every five minutes and stores them in the parquet format, making it smaller than the regular text file. All amazing, right?

Now, the weekly and …

One of the big announcements at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2014 conference this week was the unveiling of Aurora. The result of years of internal work, Aurora, currently in preview, is a MySQL 5.6-compatible option that “combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases” on the AWS infrastructure. The Aurora database engine will be made available through the Amazon RDS for Aurora service. This new database option is another example of the vibrant innovation coming from the MySQL ecosystem and key role that relational databases play in applications of today and …

This year’s last log buffer edition looks at the marvelous and splendid blog posts of Oracle, SQL Server and the MySQL databases which promise to bring more and more next year. This Log Buffer #301 promises to be the anchor for yet another action packed blogging carnival next year.

Oracle:

Kristin Rose is asking to join hands and hearts this holiday season with Oracle.

Phill Hill has a nice post about Open as in Transparent: Instructure Conducts 2nd Public Security Audit on …