If you've ever kicked off an RDS snapshot export to S3 and then sat there wondering "Is this thing even working?"—this one's for you.
AWS quietly dropped an update on December 19, 2025 that solves one of those small but annoying pain points we've all dealt with: lack of visibility into snapshot exports.
The Problem We've All Faced
Picture this scenario. You're migrating a production database, and compliance requires you to archive snapshots to S3 in Parquet format for long-term analytics. You start the export, grab a coffee, come back... and the console just shows "In Progress."
No idea how far along it is. No clue which tables are done. No visibility into whether that one massive table is going to take 10 minutes or 10 hours.
I've been in situations where stakeholders ask "When will this be done?" and all I could say was "It's running." Not a great look.
What Changed
RDS now gives you actual insight into your snapshot exports. Four new event types tell you:
- Current export progress — percentage complete, tables exported vs pending
- Table-level notifications — especially useful for those massive tables that take forever
- Exported data sizes — helps you track throughput and plan storage
- Troubleshooting recommendations — when something fails, you get actionable guidance
A Real-World Example
Say you're exporting a 500GB snapshot from your e-commerce RDS MySQL instance. The snapshot has 45 tables, but three of them—orders, order_items, and user_activity_logs—make up 80% of the data.
Before this update:
Export Status: In Progress
Started: 2 hours ago
That's it. You're flying blind.
After this update:
You subscribe to SNS notifications and get events like:
Export Progress: 67% complete
Tables exported: 42/45
Tables pending: orders, order_items, user_activity_logs
Data exported: 115 GB
Current table: orders (estimated 180 GB)
Now you can tell your team: "The three big tables are still processing. Based on the throughput, we're looking at another 90 minutes."
Setting This Up
The setup is straightforward:
- Go to RDS in the AWS Console
- Navigate to Event subscriptions
- Create a new subscription targeting snapshot export events
- Point it to an SNS topic
- Subscribe your email, Slack webhook, or Lambda function to that topic From the CLI:
aws rds create-event-subscription \
--subscription-name snapshot-export-alerts \
--sns-topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789:rds-alerts \
--source-type db-snapshot \
--event-categories "export"
Where This Fits in Your Architecture
This feature becomes really valuable when you're building data pipelines. Consider this flow:
RDS Snapshot
→ Export to S3 (Parquet)
→ SNS notifications track progress
→ Lambda triggers when export completes
→ Glue crawler catalogs new data
→ Athena/Redshift Spectrum queries available
The SNS events let you chain automation reliably. No more polling the API to check if the export finished.
Supported Engines
This works with:
- RDS PostgreSQL
- RDS MySQL
- RDS MariaDB
Available in all commercial regions where RDS operates.
Why This Matters for Operations
Three practical benefits I see:
Better capacity planning. When you know export throughput, you can schedule jobs during maintenance windows with confidence.
Faster incident response. If an export fails at table 38 of 45, you know exactly where to look. The troubleshooting recommendations point you toward the issue.
Stakeholder communication. You can give accurate ETAs instead of vague "it's running" responses. Small thing, but it builds trust.
Wrapping Up
This isn't a flashy feature. It's a quality-of-life improvement that makes RDS snapshot exports actually manageable at scale.
If you're doing regular exports for compliance archiving, disaster recovery prep, or feeding data lakes—set up the SNS subscription. The visibility alone is worth the five minutes of configuration.
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