AWS Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL

 AWS goes after Microsoft’s SQL Server with Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL | TechCrunch

AWS today announced a new database product that is clearly meant to go after Microsoft’s SQL Server and make it easier — and cheaper — for SQL Server users to migrate to the AWS cloud. The new service is Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL. The tagline AWS CEO Andy Jassy used for this service in his re:Invent keynote today is probably telling: “Stop paying for SQL Server licenses you don’t need.” And to show how serious it is about this, the company is even open-sourcing the tool.

What Babelfish does is provide a translation layer for SQL Server’s proprietary SQL dialect (T-SQL) and communications protocol so that businesses can switch to AWS’ Aurora relational database at will (though they’ll still have to migrate their existing data). It provides translations for the dialect, but also SQL commands, cursors, catalog views, data types, triggers, stored procedures and functions.

The promise here is that companies won’t have to replace their database drivers or rewrite and verify their database requests to make this transition.