Recently I had the pleasure of digging in deep on some AWS RDS issues for one of my clients that brought me back to the basics in a way. I needed to get deep into finding a few rogue queries that were bogging down the DB and causing issues up stream.

Fortunately I remembered AWS RDS Performance Insights were a thing. Since I have been working with DynamoDB and starting to learn next generation DBs like AWS Neptune I have not been working with RDS as much for my own projects but it’s always good to circle back to good old reliable RDS.

What Is Performance Insights: It is an amazing tool that lets you get crazy granular and target specific queries.

It ranks the top offending queries as far as latency and number of times run. How is this useful? What does it matter if 1 query a day runs for 30 seconds while there is a query that runs 1,000,000 times a day for 4 seconds. You can also break it down by user, host, etc.

This actually gives me some fun ideas for Cloud War Games Scenarios I could throw at people as well to better teach them how to use Performance Insights to track down slow queries in production.

If you need help deciphering the colorful graphs reach out to me and let's chat.

Question For You: What tools are you using to track down and fix slow queries in your infrastructure?