It is 2024 and one would think that BigFix can run with a Dabatase in Amazon RDS.
We are implementing a new BigFix environment and one of our client’s requirement is to use Amazon RDS for this implementation for costs and reliability reasons.
Does BigFix 11 support SQL Server running on Amazon RDS?
No expert and no experience with RDS but I don’t see how it can be possible… The limitation will be access imho. You need to have SA rights during install and upgrades and RDS are never going to give you that!
Great question though. I’d love to be a fly on the PM wall for all the cloud-planning things.
Agreed! It did get me thinking how can potentially be supported and what I came to is a pop-up when you launch the BESAdmin tool to update schema/set-up db & schema/etc that it will actually give you the option to see what SQL queries it is trying to run before running them and have the options/button “Run” and “Mark as Complete & Skip”, so that for someone on SAAS DB or other kind of DBs without SA can get someone with rights to run them (I am assuming that there would be a way to get AWS Support to run certain SA-level commands/scripts for you).
This is why we don’t currently support Amazon RDS or similar hosted DB services, because we need access during install/upgrade that is not provided.
That said, this has been frequently requested and there should be an IDEA for it that should be voted on or created if one does not exist.
FWIW submitting ideas is always good. We are tracking an internal requirement for RDS specifically, and are looking at possible changes to our authorization and hosting models.
If this is a feature you would absolutely leverage if we enabled it, it would be great to hear from you (feel free to DM). Thank you.
I have to say… Server on AWS Linux and DB on RDS … could be compelling. 
Do you mean running it on Amazon Linux 2 which is kind of a flavor of CentOS, instead of RHEL?
That is technically possible, but unsupported and a lot of the relevance of things for managing the root server assumes RHEL instead of more broadly RHEL family. Testing and validating the root server on all of RHEL family is very complex.
Would you mind sharing the link to the IDEA?
We are highly interested in this feature and willing to work with you. This is one of our most important implementations and our customer has been asking for RDS support for years(We have engaged our TA before and was told it was not supported at all). I will send a DM.
That is correct at this time.
I think that technically / theoretically with things as they are now, you could through great effort, get BigFix to run in Amazon RDS temporarily, but at that point you could never upgrade BigFix ever again without redeploying it to a brand new DB every single time and going through the process of setting up the DB all over again. Even worse than that, I think you would have to migrate the DB from Amazon RDS to a typical DB, do the upgrade, then migrate it back. This would be way beyond “not supported” and would greatly hurt any advantage of running within RDS.
Hopefully in the future this would not be required.
I can’t seem to find an existing one. Would be helpful if you would create one and then share the link here.
RDS is, of course, a service which hosts many flavors of databases. One imagines that SQLServer-on-RDS might be something that the BF developers could achieve without horrific reinvention.
Then again, I’m just a dog on the Internet. 
that is the particular flavor I was referring to, but good clarification.
If database is installed on an on-prem SQL server, migration to RDS could be an option.