"Downgrading" AWS RDS from Standard Edition to Web Edition

Question

I am looking for guidance in "downgrading" an RDS instance. Currently, the DB engine is the Standard Edition and my client wants to instead use the Web Edition. I understand how to upgrade between major and minor versions, but I'm having a hard time finding anything specific about downgrading and I'm looking to see if anyone has any suggestions / tips. My client originally wanted the endpoint to remain the same as well, which I told them was incredibly unlikely, but if I'm wrong please let me know!

Also if I missed that this is a duplicate question, please point me in the correct direction. I've been searching a while and maybe I just missed something.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't believe you can actually downgrade as such I'm afraid. You can certainly move 'up' editions of SQL via db snapshot and restore, but going in the other direction isn't possible in that way.

If you need to go from Standard to Web, you'll have to go down the 'native' SQL backup and restore route, but I don't know how practical that is for your scenario (how many dbs you need to move etc - it could all be scripted though).

Backing up the existing DBs in your RDS Standard instance and then restoring them to a new RDS Web instance should work. As it would be a new instance it would also be a new endpoint.