My database on Amazon currently has only a little data in it (I am making a web app but it is still in development) and I am looking to delete it, make changes to the schema, and put it back up again. The past few times I have done this, I have completely recreated my elasticbeanstalk app, but there seems like there is a better way. On my local machine, I will take the following steps:
Is there something like this that I can do on amazon to delete my database and put it back online again without deleting the entire application? When I tried just deleting the RDS instance a while ago and making a new one, I was having problems with elasticbeanstalk.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to SSH to one of your EC2 instances, that has acccess to the RDS DB, and then connect to the DB from there. Make sure that your python scripts can read your app configuration to access the configured DB, or add arguments for DB hostname. To drop and create your DB, you must just add the necessary arguments to connect to the DB. For example:
$ createdb -h <RDS endpoint> -U <user> -W ebdb
You can also create a RDS snapshot when the DB is empty, and use the RDS instance actions Restore to Point in Time or Migrate Latest Snapshot.