Open Databases
An open source database is just a regular database that’s distributed with its source code. Users can read, revise, and extend the software freely, although few use these opportunities. 'Crystallography Open Database (COD): an open-access collection of crystal structures and platform for world-wide collaboration', Nucleic Acids Research. (2012) PDF version We thank Crystal Impact GbR for their financial support of the publication 'Crystallography Open Database - an open-access collection of crystal structures'.
Open databases are the core component of the Linkable Open Data Environment (LODE). Several open databases have been released and more are in open development. You can contribute to their development by reporting new publicly available datasets released by municipalities, provinces or other organizations.
Open databases released
The Open Database of Buildings (ODB) version 2.0 contains approximately 4.4 million building footprints compiled from 65 sources.
The database is in GIS (Geographic Information System) format.
Release dates:
- March 1, 2019 — Version 2.0
- November 1, 2018 — Version 1.0
The Open Database of Educational Facilities
The Open Database of Educational Facilities (ODEF) contains addresses of educational facilities across Canada. In its current version it contains over 20,000 records compiled from both open sources and from publicly available data (with permission from the data owners).
The database is in CSV (comma-separated values) format.
Release date:
- August 19, 2019 — Version 1.0
The Open Database of Healthcare Facilities (ODHF) contains the names, addresses and geo-coordinates of healthcare facilities across Canada. Facilities are classified by type. The current version (version 1.1) contains approximately 7,000 records compiled from open data sources, publicly available data, and data directly provided by sources for inclusion as open data.
The database is in CSV (comma-separated values) format.
Release dates:
- August 7, 2020 — Version 1.1
- April 17, 2020 — Version 1.0
The Open Database of Cultural and Art Facilities
The Open Database of Cultural and Art Facilities (ODCAF) contains the names, addresses, and geo-coordinates of a variety of cultural and art facilities across Canada, including museums, galleries, libraries and art centres. This database contains approximately 8,000 records compiled from both open and publicly available data sources.
The database is in CSV (comma-separated values) format.
Release date:
- October 2, 2020 — Version 1.0
Open databases in development
The following open databases are in development. Most of the datasets used for their development are listed in the LODE GitHub repository. You can contribute to the development of these open databases by reporting additional publically available databases that should be considered for inclusion.
The Open Database of Addresses (ODA) is a database of civic addresses and their geo-locations. Development is ongoing through a collaboration with OpenAddresses.
When possible, open address records are linked to the Open Database of Buildings.
The Open Database of Businesses
The Open Database of Businesses contains addresses of business name and locations. It also includes information on the type of business and legal nature of business, when supplied by the data providers.
The database is in development on the LODE GitHub repository, where you can submit suggestions for additional datasets.
The Open Database of Recreational and Sport Facilities contains the name and location of major recreational spaces and amenities across Canada (such as arenas, public pools, ski resorts, etc.). Facilities are classified by type. Records are compiled from both open sources and from publicly available data (with permission from the data owners).
The database is in development on the LODE GitHub repository, where you can submit suggestions for additional datasets.
The Open Database of Infrastructures
The Open Database of Infrastructure contains the name and location of major transport and physical infrastructures such as airports, railway stations, bridges and elevated roads, etc. Infrastructures are classified by type. Records are compiled from both open sources and from publicly available data (with permission from the data owners).
The database is in development on the LODE GitHub repository, where you can submit suggestions for additional datasets.
Open source databases now support a vast array of modern applications, ranging from the most popular mobile apps, to the leading eCommerce platforms, to mission critical enterprise systems for F500 organizations. In fact, open source databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis all rank among the world’s most popular databases. Fast-growing companies and large enterprises alike prefer open source databases due to their low cost, freedom from traditional license models, flexibility, community-backed development and support, and large ecosystems of tools and extensions. While open source databases are widely available, they can become difficult and time-consuming to manage in production environments. AWS Database Services make it easy to manage open source database workloads in the cloud with performance, scalability, and availability.
MySQL is the most widely adopted open source relational database and serves as the primary relational data store for many popular websites, applications, and commercial products.
AWS Offerings
- Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition
PostgreSQL is a feature-rich open source relational database backed by more than 20 years of community development. It is the primary data store for many web, mobile, geospatial, and analytics applications.
AWS Offerings
MariaDB is a popular variant of MySQL which was founded by the original developers of MySQL. While MariaDB is maintained separately from MySQL and includes its own rich feature sets, it retains a high degree of MySQL compatibility, including library binary equivalency, and exact matching with APIs.
AWS Offerings
MongoDB is an open source, NoSQL database that provides support for JSON-styled, document-oriented storage systems. Its offers a flexible data model and provides full index support, sharding, and replication.
AWS Offerings
Redis is a fast, open source, in-memory key-value data store for use as a database, cache, message broker, and queue. Redis is a popular choice for caching, session management, real-time analytics, geospatial, chat/messaging, media streaming, and gaming leaderboards.
AWS Offerings
Memcached is an easy-to-use, high-performance, in-memory data store. It offers a mature, scalable, open-source solution for delivering sub-millisecond response times making it useful as a cache or session store.
AWS Offerings
AWS database services for open source engines
A managed service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS supports 6 familiar engines, including 3 open source databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB. RDS supports the latest major and minor versions of open source databases, ensuring that the code, applications, and tools you already use today can be used with Amazon RDS.
Open Databases In Python
A MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. Amazon Aurora gives you 5x the performance of MySQL and 3x of PostgreSQL, with the security, availability, and reliability of commercial-grade databases at 1/10th the cost. Aurora features a distributed storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).
A Redis- and Memcached-compatible in-memory data store that gives you microsecond latency for millions of reads and writes per second. Built on open source Redis, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis works with your Redis clients and uses the open Redis data format to store your data. Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached is a Memcached-compatible in-memory key-value store service that can be used as a cache or a data store.
A fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Amazon DocumentDB is designed from the ground-up to give you the performance, scalability, and availability you need when operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads at scale. Amazon DocumentDB implements the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API, allowing you to use your existing MongoDB drivers and tools with Amazon DocumentDB.
Sample use case
Web application backend with caching
Customer stories
Airbnb is a community marketplace that allows property owners and travelers to connect with each other for the purpose of renting unique vacation spaces around the world. Airbnb moved its MySQL database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) because it simplifies much of the time-consuming administrative tasks typically associated with databases. Amazon RDS allows difficult procedures, such as replication and scaling, to be completed with a basic API call or through the AWS Management Console. Learn more »
Grab is an online transportation network and technology company with the goal to make transportation accessible to everyone. Grab is available across six countries in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines. By using Amazon Redshift and Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, Grab is able to use real time data computation and data streams to support 1.5 million bookings in Southeast Asia. Learn more »
Trimble is a global leader in telematics solutions. They had a significant investment in on-premises hardware in North America and Europe running Oracle databases. Rather than refresh the hardware and renew the licenses, they opted to migrate the databases to AWS. They ran the AWS Schema Conversion Tool to analyze the effort, and then migrated their complete database to a managed PostgreSQL service on Amazon RDS. Learn more »
Getting started
Create and Connect to a MySQL Database with Amazon RDS
In this tutorial, you will learn how to create an environment to run your MySQL database (we call this environment an 'instance'), connect to the database, and delete the DB instance.
Learn more »Create and Connect to a PostgreSQL Database with Amazon RDS
In this tutorial, you will learn how to create an environment to run your PostgreSQL database (we call this environment an 'instance'), connect to the database, and delete the DB instance.
Create and Connect to a MariaDB Database with Amazon RDS
In this tutorial, you will learn how to create an environment to run your MariaDB database (we call this environment an 'instance'), connect to the database, and delete the DB instance.
Configure and connect to serverless MySQL database with Amazon Aurora Serverless
In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure and connect to Amazon Aurora Serverless.
Getting started with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
Find topics that lead you through creating, granting access to, connecting to, and finally deleting a Redis (cluster mode disabled) cluster using the ElastiCache Management Console.
Speeding up WordPress with Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached
Open Databases By Using Record Level Locking
In this tutorial we will explore how to improve the performance of your WordPress website with Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached.