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It has been my understanding that you cannot attach an Amazon RDS SSD volume to an EC2 instance. I was under the impression that the RDS instances were a "managed" solution and that the volume was not accessible. I've searched the RDS Dashboard for a section on Volumes but don't see any options.

However, the wording in an appendix in the Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide has me confused. Under step 1 (from the above link) it says, "Start SQL Server Profiler. It is installed in the Performance Tools folder of your SQL Server instance folder."

Is this a documentation error or is it actually possible to access the RDS SSD volume directly?

I have not been able to find an answer through any of the Google searches, SE sites or AWS forums.

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No, it is not possible to directly access an RDS disk volume or an RDS server itself. As you surmised, it's a fully managed database service that's provided by AWS. As a managed service they provide all sorts of additional features like read-replicas, mirroring across availability zones, etc.

If you think about it a bit, it wouldn't make sense for them to offer a database server and then give you access to it. If they gave you full access to it then they couldn't provide these add-on services since you could break them by logging into the server and making manual configuration changes to it. And if you had a need for full access to a database then you could simply launch your own EC2 instance and install SQL Server, Oracle, etc. and manage it all yourself.

I think the confusion stems from the fact that you need to install SQL Server on a client system in order to have access to the SQL Server Profiler. That section of the AWS documentation is referring to the installation on your client system - they just refer to it generically as an "instance".

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    The idea of partial access to managed resources is not uncommon (take web hosting for example) and there are numerous definitions of the term "managed". However, I'm not quite clear on why your commments - about whether or not full/partial access would or would not "make sense" in a managed service - have anything to do with whether or not access is in fact "possible". Minus that and the AWS "managed service" sales pitch, I'm inclined to agree with you that that section of the document is referring to a client system and not the RDS instance.
    – Rich C
    Oct 23, 2014 at 21:56
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As stated earlier in the linked document, "Amazon RDS does not allow direct host access to a DB instance via Telnet, Secure Shell (SSH), or Windows Remote Desktop Connection." It is assumed this includes direct storage volume access.

The linked document details steps "To run a client-side trace on a SQL Server DB Instance". The term "client-side" implies that that the steps are referring to a process carried out on the client and not the server (as opposed to the next section "Running a server-side trace on a SQL Server DB Instance"). As such, the "Performance Tools folder" mentioned in step 1 is likely referring to a folder on your client system.

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