Inside Aurora DSQL: How AWS Blew Up the Monolithic Database
Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP
Having spent two years with the AWS team building Aurora DSQL, I explain how we replaced the traditional monolithic database with independent, horizontally scalable services. By leveraging synchronized clocks and optimistic concurrency control, the system achieves zero-round-trip consistent reads and eliminates the slow lock holder problem. While this aggressive architecture offers predictable latency and strong consistency, it requires developers to accept smaller transaction limits and handle write conflicts differently.
We took a traditional monolithic database and blew out every single component into an independent, horizontally scalable service.
- gtowey
I literally just wrote a blog post which explains the kind of problem they're trying to solve and why any solution is just choosing where the pain is.
https://gtowey.blogspot.com/2026/07/why-are-databases-so-har...
Their paper talks about a lot of the same things I do, and if you read both, you can see the nature of the tradeoffs they make and where the pain points are still hiding.
- loevborg
DSQL looks like a Big Deal to me - solving the essential scaling bottleneck that relational DBs give you without ending up with a weird system like dynamodb that no one wants to use.
Why aren't more people talking about it?