Amazon Web Services Inc. today made its in-memory cache for its DynamoDB database generally available, just two months after launching it in preview mode.

AWS Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels made the announcement in a blog post on Wednesday. He said the DynamoDB Accelerator, or DAX, enables a sharply improved performance on certain kinds of database queries using DynamoDB.

It’s especially useful for queries in which applications need to read lots of data in real-time, as opposed to milliseconds later. Vogels added that customers including Expedia Inc. and Tinder Inc. have already been using the preview version for some time.

DAX can boost performance because it adds a cache of specific data for applications to access without needing to go to the database itself. It can handle millions of simultaneous queries and deliver answers within milliseconds, Vogels said. Caching data is an obvious step to boost performance, but many companies neglect to do so at first, only to realize later they’ll have to rewrite their applications in order to implement one. DAX therefore provides an easier way around this problem, Vogels said, because all it requires is a few tweaks for the application to understand the cache is present.

“Caches reduce latencies to microseconds, increases throughput, and in many cases, help customers save money by reducing the amount of resources they have to overprovision for their databases,” Vogels wrote.

The move comes at a time when database competition among the main public cloud providers is heating up, as they all court larger enterprises with more complex requirements than the startups AWS initially focused on.

For example, Microsoft Corp. last month launched a new database called Cosmos DB that’s designed for speed and reliability. Meanwhile, Google Inc. made its Cloud Spanner service generally available earlier this year.

Image: AWS