James Morle

Principal Engineer at AWS, imperfect human bean, all views here are my own

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

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[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@gwenshap Ghosting them and invalidating their query results?

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@MarcJBrooker I’ve been using it for two days, and I’m super impressed!

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

I’m looking for ‘interesting’ silicon wafers for my personal mini-museum. CPU, FPU, GPU, *ROM, *RAM, historic and new. Please DM or reply if you can help! Any RTs highly appreciated, to help spread the word!

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@MarcJBrooker Perhaps the intent here is that the MCP APIs are suboptimal for serious database access? I can get behind that, they are quite inefficient and naive currently.
But as to whether agents should access prod data - they absolutely should, that’s the whole point.

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@davepl1968 @marklucovsky In my Facebook days, I would see people leaving the campus with a stack of 4-5 togo boxes of dinner. Feed the whole family, or all your friends, it’s ok! It’s hard, living on the breadline…

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

Case-in-point: My Ubiquiti network management app is very nice, but it makes it really difficult to ask my LLM to just work out what's wrong with my AP config that causes interference.

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

Epiphany of the day (for me): All user interfaces now need a "just dump everything in text format and download" method of viewing settings. Why? Because LLMs can digest it easier that way.

[Raul Junco @RaulJuncoV]

DynamoDB and Aurora had a baby -> Aurora DSQL.

This is what you need to know.

For decades, scaling relational databases meant trade-offs:

- Read replicas for reads.
- Sharding for writes.
- And a pile of glue code to fake global consistency.

That’s the reality we live with.

But Aurora DSQL promises pure scalability; no hacks, no compromises. Aurora DSQL is a new serverless SQL database, optimized for transaction processing, and designed for the cloud.

It just went Generally Available, and it's rewriting how we think about scale in transactional systems.

Built on PostgreSQL, powered by a distributed architecture, and backed by Rust for low-latency performance, Aurora DSQL brings active-active, multi-region SQL to the mainstream.

All the SQL stuff you expect is there: transactions, schemas, indexes, joins, and so on, all with strong consistency and isolation.

Just one endpoint per region. Write anywhere. Read anywhere. Strongly consistent.

Why this matters:

- Write scalability without sharding.
- True multi-region failover without downtime.
- PostgreSQL compatibility; your apps don’t need rewriting.
- Auto-scaling without provisioning complexity.

And yes, it feels like DynamoDB and Aurora had a baby, and it speaks SQL.

We’re witnessing a shift where distributed SQL isn’t just research material or niche; it’s production-ready, cloud-native, and cost-aware.

I think this unlocks a new design space for systems that need transactional guarantees and global scale, without having to choose one.

Is this the end of database hacks in large-scale systems?

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@apparentorder @astuyve I'd be happy to investigate this further! Can you ping me your cluster ID over DM, please?

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

Happy to share that Aurora DSQL is now Generally Available!

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@gwenshap Some of the recent cardinality estimation research is very interesting. Machine learning brings a CBO similar levels of insight to a skilled developer that really understand the data patterns. Inference time is still a challenge though.

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

LLMs have been transformational to my workflow. I didn't realize how much until my API access was disrupted for a day last week.
I missed the pure labor saving stuff the most:
- Topping and tailing code with arguments and help messages
- Coding ANYTHING that accesses databases

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@connor_mc_d ORDER BY dbms_random.random();

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Other takeaway is how AWS seems to have played GenAI just right with Bedrock (even if they have no own high-quality LLMs) This team looked at options and settled on Bedrock. It's secure, they trust AWS, & doesn't train on your data. You can choose your model.

I hear so many companies who are a bit more conservative/worried about their data and:

1. Would want to host their own LLMs...

2. ... but it's a lot of work and is expensive

3. Hear about Bedrock. "Oh, it's what we need"

Home run by AWS

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@MarcJBrooker Nobody has seriously run Oracle databases on top of a filesystem for decades, for lots of very good reasons, including the ones in this thread. Then you have other good reasons such as the cost and futility of buffering a buffer.

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

Euclidean might help for non-linear layouts, like Hs and Ys, but only if there is a way to walk the Euclidean path!

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

Airport gate numbering is missing a trick: for some terminal layouts, the number interval between gates could be proportional to distance. If Gate 1 has a gate adjacent to it, call it Gate 2. If it’s 10x further, call it Gate 10. If it’s 100x further call it Gate 100.

[James Morle @JamesMorle]

@Chris_Mellor “Woncshe more, we play our dangeroush game, a game of chessh…”