Open-source Amazon Aurora alternatives

TiDB is a cloud-native, open-source distributed SQL database from PingCAP. The name's Ti stands for titanium, and it is built for high availability, strong consistency and the ability to scale out as data and traffic grow, while staying compatible with MySQL so existing applications and tools can connect with little change.

Distributed transactions use a two-phase commit protocol to keep ACID guarantees even across nodes, through network partitions or node failures. It scales horizontally by adding nodes or vertically by adding resources, without downtime, and its architecture separates compute from storage so each can be adjusted independently. Built-in Raft consensus keeps multiple replicas in sync and handles automated failover. Topics also mention HTAP workloads, analytics and native vector search.

TiDB is written in Go under the Apache-2.0 license. It can be deployed on your own infrastructure or consumed as a managed cloud service, and it suits teams that have outgrown a single MySQL server and want horizontal scale without sharding by hand.

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database for building, scaling and managing data-intensive modern applications. It is layered on a transactional, strongly consistent key-value store and offers a familiar SQL API for defining, changing and querying data, with ACID transactions across the cluster.

It scales horizontally by adding nodes and is designed to keep running through failed disks, machines, racks and even whole datacenters, with little added latency and no manual recovery. Control over where data is placed is part of the pitch, which matters for locality and compliance. Documentation covers installation, development, deployment and administration, client drivers, and a comparison with other databases, and the design is explained in a public architecture document.

CockroachDB is written in Go. Its license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub, so review the current license terms before using it commercially. You can run your own cluster or let Cockroach Labs run it as the managed CockroachDB Cloud service. It suits teams that need resilient, multi-region relational storage without sharding by hand.

MySQL is a widely used open-source relational database. This repository contains the MySQL Server source code along with MySQL Cluster, which the description presents as a real-time, open-source transactional database. Applications talk to it using SQL, and it is a common choice for web applications and embedded products.

The MySQL website describes several offerings built around the server: the Community Edition, with a published governance model and early access builds; MySQL Enterprise Edition for advanced features, management tools and technical support; MySQL HeatWave, a cloud service that combines transactions with analytics and machine learning; and MySQL Cluster CGE. A program for OEM and ISV vendors covers embedding the database in other products.

The server is written in C++ and distributed under licenses detailed in the repository. Organizations can run the Community Edition on their own infrastructure, buy a commercial edition from Oracle, which owns the project, or use a managed cloud offering. Documentation, downloads and a developer zone are available on mysql.com.

YugabyteDB is a distributed SQL database that is compatible with PostgreSQL. It combines the relational features of traditional databases with the scale-out design of NoSQL systems, and is intended for cloud-native OLTP applications that need correct data and at least one of scalability, tolerance to failures or global distribution.

Its SQL layer, YSQL, reuses the PostgreSQL query layer and so supports most PostgreSQL features, including data types, stored procedures, triggers and extensions. Its transaction model follows the design of Google Spanner, using Raft consensus for replication and hybrid logical clocks for distributed ACID transactions, with snapshot, serializable and read committed isolation. Reads are strongly consistent by default and can be tuned to read from followers and replicas.

The database can be configured to withstand failures at the level of a disk, rack, node, zone, region or whole cloud, recovering on its own, and the topics mention multi-region, multi-cloud and Kubernetes deployments. The project is written mainly in C and C++, the repository lists its license as Other, and documentation covers architecture, roadmap and how to build applications.

OceanBase is a distributed relational database developed by Ant Group. It runs on a cluster of commodity servers and uses the Paxos protocol and a distributed architecture to provide high availability and scalability, without depending on a specific hardware architecture.

It is compatible with MySQL, which eases migration from MySQL databases, and supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing, so one engine can serve both OLTP and OLAP workloads. The project now describes itself as a unified, multi-model database for the AI era, with topics that include vector search and full-text search. Cloud-native operation is supported through a Kubernetes operator.

You can try it by deploying a stand-alone instance with an all-in-one package on Linux, starting a Docker container from images on Docker Hub, quay.io or ghcr.io, or running it on Kubernetes with ob-operator. OceanBase is written in C++ and licensed under Apache-2.0, with a developer guide for compiling the observer yourself.

Neon is a serverless Postgres database platform that is open source. It separates storage from compute and replaces the PostgreSQL storage layer with one that distributes data across a cluster of nodes, which enables autoscaling, branching of databases in the style of code, and scaling down to zero.

A running Neon system is made up of compute nodes plus a dedicated storage engine. The compute nodes are stateless PostgreSQL instances backed by that engine, whose two main components are the Pageserver, a scalable storage backend for the compute nodes, and the Safekeepers, a redundant write-ahead-log service that keeps WAL durably until the Pageserver has processed it and uploaded it to cloud storage. Developer documentation describes the architecture in more detail.

The easiest way to try Neon is the hosted Neon Free Tier, connecting with psql, DBeaver or the online SQL editor. The project is also written in Rust and licensed under Apache-2.0 so you can compile and run it locally for experiments, with build instructions for Linux and macOS. It suits teams that want Postgres with branching for development workflows and elastic scaling.