Amazon RDS Aurora MySQL – Differences Among Editions

Amazon Aurora with MySQL Compatibility comes in three editions which, at the time of writing, have quite a few differences around the features that they support. Make sure you don’t assume the newer Aurora 2.x supports everything in Aurora 1.x. On the contrary, right now Aurora 1.x (MySQL 5.6 based) supports most Aurora features. The serverless option was launched for this version, and it’s not based on the latest MySQL 5.7. However, the serverless option, too, has its own set of limitations

I found a concise comparison of what is available in which Amazon Aurora edition hard to come by so I’ve created one. The table was compiled based mostly on documentation research, so if you spot some mistakes please let me know and I’ll make a correction.

Please keep in mind, this is expected to change over time. For example Amazon Aurora 2.x was initially released without Performance_Schema support, which was enabled in later versions.

There seems to be lag porting Aurora features from MySQL 5.6 compatible to MySQL 5.7 compatible – the current 2.x release does not include features introduced in Aurora 1.16 or later as per this document

A comparison table

	MySQL 5.6 Based	MySQL 5.7 Based	Serverless MySQL 5.6 Based
Compatible to MySQL	MySQL 5.6.10a	MySQL 5.7.12	MySQL 5.6.10a
Aurora Engine Version	1.18.0	2.03.01	1.18.0
Parallel Query	Yes	No	No
Backtrack	Yes	No	No
Aurora Global Database	Yes	No	No
Performance Insights	Yes	No	No
SELECT INTO OUTFILE S3	Yes	Yes	Yes
Amazon Lambda – Native Function	Yes	No	No
Amazon Lambda – Stored Procedure	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hash Joins	Yes	No	Yes
Fast DDL	Yes	Yes	Yes
LOAD DATA FROM S3	Yes	Yes	No
Spatial Indexing	Yes	Yes	Yes
Asynchronous Key Prefetch (AKP)	Yes	No	Yes
Scan Batching	Yes	No	Yes
S3 Backed Based Migration	Yes	No	No
Advanced Auditing	Yes	Yes	No
Aurora Replicas	Yes	Yes	No
Database Cloning	Yes	Yes	No
IAM database authentication	Yes	Yes	No
Cross-Region Read Replicas	Yes	Yes	No
Restoring Snapshot from MySQL DB	Yes	Yes	No
Enhanced Monitoring	Yes	Yes	No
Log Export to Cloudwatch	Yes	Yes	No
Minor Version Upgrade Control	Yes	Yes	Always On
Data Encryption Configuration	Yes	Yes	Always On
Maintenance Window Configuration	Yes	Yes	No