Building Node.js applications with Sequelize ORM and Amazon Aurora DSQL

This article demonstrates how to build Node.js applications using Sequelize ORM with Amazon Aurora DSQL, a serverless PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database.

• Define Sequelize models with UUID primary keys suited to Aurora DSQL's distributed architecture
• Connect using IAM authentication with the Aurora DSQL Connector for node-postgres, which auto-generates and refreshes tokens
• Model relationships using database-enforced foreign keys or application-level UUID references
• Implement optimistic concurrency control (OCC) retry logic with exponential backoff for handling write conflicts
• Run CRUD operations for a hotel reservation system with guests, rooms, reservations, and payments
• Set up non-admin application users with least-privilege IAM roles and custom schemas
• Execute DDL statements individually since Aurora DSQL allows one per transaction

The patterns demonstrated—UUID keys, schema-qualified models, connector integration, and OCC retry helpers—apply broadly to Node.js workloads on Aurora DSQL and enable scaling from demo to production with minimal data layer changes.