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Make room, guys. Here comes the Postgres with the mostess on AWS

WunderDB joins MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft on Jeff Bezos' cut-price lot

re:Invent 2013 Amazon has started serving up hot clusters of PostgreSQL on its managed database service, but at a large price.

The arrival of PostgreSQL comes after Amazon was peppered with requests by developers for the database, the company said on Thursday, and takes the total number of databases supported by the company's Relational Database Service to four.

"PostgreSQL has become the preferred open source relational database for many enterprise developers and start-ups, powering leading geospatial and mobile applications," the company wrote.

The company is launching with version 9.3.1 of PostgreSQL, and plans to support new versions "as they become available". It will also support the geospatial PostGIS tech, the PL/Perl, PL/Tcl, and PL/pgSQL query languages, text search dictionaries, datatypes like Hstore and JSON, and others.

The database will cost $0.084 per hour on a 'Small DB Instance', compared with $0.080 for MySQL, $0.17 for SQL Server, and $0.14 for Oracle.

Amazon RDS does not give admins host access to DB instances, and restricts access to "certain system procedures and tables that require advanced priviliges", the company said.

Admins will gain some control, though, via the rds_superuser account, which lets them add available AWS RDS extensions, manage tablespaces, view (and remotely kill) user connections, and grant and revoke replication privileges.

By adding PostgreSQL, Amazon has widened the gap between it and cloud competitors Google and Microsoft, who for now field MySQL (Google), and SQL Server and Oracle (Microsoft) on their clouds.

It also heightens competition between Amazon and the Salesforce-backed platform cloud Heroku, which has been a vocal supporter of the tech for several years and updates its own Postgres option on Monday.

It just so happens that Heroku is based entirely on AWS infrastructure, so along with getting requests from developers Amazon has also been able to closely monitor the success of PostgreSQL on Heroku as well.

Remember, folks, that if you're spinning wheels on Crazy Jeff's lot, he'll keep a close eye on how far you get. ®

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