What is Amazon QLDB?

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central trusted authority. You can use Amazon QLDB to track all application data changes, and maintain a complete and verifiable history of changes over time. To learn more about the variety of database options available on Amazon Web Services, see Choosing the right database for your organization on AWS.

Ledgers are typically used to record a history of economic and financial activity in an organization. Many organizations build applications with ledger-like functionality because they want to maintain an accurate history of their applications' data. For example, they might want to track the history of credits and debits in banking transactions, verify the data lineage of an insurance claim, or trace the movement of an item in a supply chain network. Ledger applications are often implemented using custom audit tables or audit trails created in relational databases.

Amazon QLDB is a new class of database that helps eliminate the need to engage in the complex development effort of building your own ledger-like applications. With QLDB, the history of changes to your data is immutable—it can't be overwritten or altered in place. And using cryptography, you can verify that there have been no unintended changes to your application's data. QLDB uses an immutable transactional log, known as a journal. The journal is append-only and is composed of a sequenced and hash-chained set of blocks that contain your committed data.

Amazon QLDB video

The following video provides an overview of Amazon QLDB and explains how it can benefit you.

Amazon QLDB pricing

With Amazon QLDB, you pay only for what you use with no minimum fees or mandatory service usage. You pay only for the resources your ledger database consumes, and you do not need to provision in advance.

For more information, see Amazon QLDB pricing.

Getting started with QLDB

We recommend that you begin by reading the following topics:

• Overview of Amazon QLDB – To get a high-level overview of QLDB.

• Core concepts and terminology in Amazon QLDB – To learn fundamental QLDB concepts and terminology.

• Accessing Amazon QLDB – To learn how to access QLDB using the AWS Management Console, API, or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

• How Amazon QLDB works with IAM – To learn how to control access to QLDB using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

To get started quickly with the QLDB console, see Getting started with the Amazon QLDB console.

To learn about developing with QLDB using an AWS provided driver, see Getting started with the Amazon QLDB driver.