Amazon Aurora DSQL: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 4. PostgreSQL Compatibility — What Works and What Doesn’t

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DSQL is PostgreSQL-compatible, but it’s not PostgreSQL. That distinction matters more than you might expect. If you approach DSQL as “PostgreSQL in the cloud,” you’ll hit surprising gaps within your first hour. If you approach it as “a distributed database that speaks PostgreSQL’s dialect,” you’ll make much better decisions about what to build on it and how. This chapter is PostresSQL heavy, and assumes you have some level of understanding of it. If you don’t have a depth of knowledge in PostgresSQL, it will serve as a good reference as you design your application.

This chapter is a practitioner’s guide to the compatibility between traditional PostgresSQL and DSQL postgres. We’ll cover what works, what’s missing, what behaves differently, and most importantly, the workarounds and patterns that let you build production applications despite the gaps. By the end, you’ll know exactly which parts of your existing PostgreSQL schema and queries will work unchanged, ...