Administering databases is a full-time type of responsibility. Yes, you can get pretty sane defaults, and up and running without much difficulty with MS-SQL, and mySQL has been a defacto standard in the LAMP stack. That said PostreSQL has been a rock solid RDBMS. The commercial extensions for replication have been cumbersome and expensive. Here's hoping that AWS will grow/expand the replications options/features, and that they'll grow to include JS procs as that feature stabilizes.