Xenforo on Amazon EC2 with Aurora? ERROR 1118 (42000) while importing vBulletin database!

[Triops]

We are switching from a own server with Debian 6 (PHP 5.3) to newest Amazon Linux on EC2, with RDS with Aurora, S3 and Cloudfront. Seems to be a really nice setup.

Now, after xf1.5.15 installed fine, I wanted to testwise import the vBulletin 3 database from my external server into a temp. "forum" database on Aurora SQL. After that, I'll do the native vB->XF importer in Xenforo. All my test migrations till now were done locally mySQL -> mySQL.

But, it's not possible to import full vB database into Aurora! After few seconds, at or after importing "lanuage" table it always stop with this error:

ERROR 1118 (42000) at line 1826: Row size too large (> 8126). Changing some columns to TEXT or BLOB or using ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC or ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED may help. In current row format, BLOB prefix of 768 bytes is stored inline.

No chance. We googled a lot, but at the moment we fear that the vBulletin import may not be possible into Amazon Aurora, eg:
https://dba.stackexchange.com/quest...s-aurora-row-size-too-large-vb5/112811#112811

So, since I need urgent help (launch is planned immediatly after weekend), some questions please:

• Anybody out there successfully running Xenforo on Aurora? Will that wirk? Installation was fine but maybe problems accour only with larger datebases.
• Which vB tables are REALLY needed to import vB3 into xf1.5? Including everything, as well as reputation for "Likes" and so on? I would only export those tables then. @ChrisD, @Mike please?
• If that does not work: Could I import vB on a different MariaDB instance, import there the vBulletin tables and then use the xf core importer, connecting to a differerent SQL instance and import vB tables from MariaDB into Aurora? So source database would be on another instance than target database. Would that work, please?

Any help is highly appreciated,
Thank you in advance!

 

[Jim Boy]

I have done a bit of a trial on Aurora with XF and did not run into any problems, and that was with a pretty substantial DB (40 million + posts). Having said that I decided not to go with it as the costing was questionable

Aurora is NOT better than MariaDb/MySQL in every scenario. We found that out the hard way on another much larger database. The AWS tech describved to me Aurora more as a dependable truck able tro deliver lots of data, rather than a sportscar doing things fast.

I'd start off with non-aurora RDS first then consider migrating to Aurora depending on your needs. But hgaving said that we've been running happily on a single AZ RDS instance for a few years without issue and we are one of the bigger XF sites going around

 

[Marcus]

Aurora is fast only for specific situations. For a simple community (<10 Million Posts) it is not faster.

From what I remember Aurora can have unlimited database space, and as it relies on S3 it is very convenient to duplicate within seconds to other regions. Aurora is like Mysql developed with Amazons existing technology in mind.

Yes, Amazon is like a hotel, very convenient to setup but in the long run sure its more affordable to rent a flat.

 

[Triops]

Thank you for your helpfull comments!

Good to know, Aurora seemed to be so promising. But since I won't exceed 1.0k - 1.5mio posts in the next few years, I'll probably stay with MariaDB.
We switched now testwise to MySQL with 15GB to be safe with temp. databases (minor additional costs to 5GB) and I will try the import again...

 

[Triops]

Importing vB went through fine with mySQL - so, no Aurora for me at the moment
Thank you again!

 

[Marcus]

yes Mariadb is really nice, and Amazon handles it good.

I have used AWS services a lot over the past years and it is amazing how cheap you can get your forum running there - up to zero costs, however it takes a lot of thinking, caching and extensively using a mix of all free services in their one year offer and max each of them out until you would have to pay. And after the free year it is going to be pretty expensive. Moving to a new free account takes considerable time, too as it is not really convenient to setup cloudformation for this year-to-year action.

 

[Triops]

I passed my one year already. And I would like to stay without one-year-setup-refreshes. I assume I will be around 150 € /month, maybe 500-600 € in my main season month. That would be fine, I payed similar just for collocation of my own servers, which I had bought.