How many tables/databases AWS Aurora cloud database server can handle?

Question

Currently we are on Google Cloud and we have 5000 databases on their single Cloud SQL instance, and the server just stops every few hours, and it won't start for a few hours because of the number of the tables.

Based on their documentation, which they modified lately, they support maximum 10.000 tables per instance, and in our case we can have maximum 250 databases (we have 40 tables per database).

We are trying to find other solutions to fit our needs, and we have 40.000 databases and want a scalable cloud solution, mysql/postgresql compatible.

Can Aurora handle this ?

Mascon

First, I would not have 5,000 (or is 40,000?) databases on one system (be it a single instance or a cluster). Second, if you have this large of a setup, why are you not calling the sales department of the major vendors (AWS, Alibaba, Azure, IBM). They would love to write up this order which can include all sorts of benefits, commitments, etc.). – Lophobranch

We are hosting 40.000 websites, and try to isolate our customers databases for high availability and modularity. Currently we are on 6 Google Cloud instances, but they can't handle it. I already wrote to AWS and Azure, waiting for their response – Mascon

Please post more information as you solve this. You have a use case that I would love to see the solution for. – Lophobranch

I will no worries ! – Mascon

Answer 1

40,000 databases will NOT be a problem for a single AWS Aurora instance.

For one of our projects, we are running a multi-tenant database architecture. With tens of thousands of tenants, we are looking at more than 40k databases on one of the instances, with close to 900k InnoDB tables (with file per table enabled).

We have a similar setup on AWS Aurora and on a simple self-managed MySQL server on EC2 instances. Both setups handle a large number of tables / databases nicely. RDS shouldn't have a problem with many DBs/tables as well. It's all a matter of a sane configuration.

Quean

Thanks for sharing ! – Mascon

What is your Aurora instance size? – Enough

At one point we've managed to fit about 100k small databases on a db.r5.xlarge instance. Also moved to MySQL 8 on RDS instead of Aurora, and it too behaves nicely (with file_per_table disabled, i.e. using the global tablespace) – Quean

May I ask why RDS instead of Aurora? Cost vs. performance tradeoff in favor of cost? – Phyllotaxis

@Phyllotaxis yes, cost vs performance was one of the big drivers in the decision. – Quean