The Amazon Relational database service (RDS) provides a robust, managed platform that allows you to spend your time avoiding the undifferentiated heavy lifting of creating your own databases. These out of the box databases provided by the service do give you incredible power, freedom, and flexibility to develop and build the way you want to. However, there are many times when you might need more than the standard out of the box deployments that come native with the service.

There are situations where your data set or the actions you perform on it, are putting a unique strain on your database, and you might suffer from adverse performance. You might notice undue slowdowns or the database chugging when you try to access certain elements.

Well, that is because behind the scenes there are over 400 unique parameters that RDS uses to function. These parameters control all kinds of configuration about the database that could be affecting your performance. So for this lecture, I wanted to take a moment to discuss parameter groups and how you can use them to get every little bit of extra tuning and power out of your database instances.