Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports Optimized Reads for up to 2X faster query processing compared to previous generation instances. Optimized Read-enabled instances achieve faster query processing by placing temporary tables generated by the MariaDB server on the NVMe SSD-based block-level instance storage that’s physically connected to the host server. Complex queries that utilize temporary tables, such as queries involving sorts, hash aggregations, high-load joins, and Common Table Expressions (CTEs) can now execute up to 2X faster with Optimized Reads on RDS for MariaDB.