Accessing Amazon RDS from Desktop

Every once in a while it is handy to be able to access an Amazon RDS Database Instance remotely from a desktop.

ssh -i YOUR-AMAZON-PRIVATE-KEY.pem -l YOUR-AMAZON-RDS-USERNAME -L 33060:YOUR-AMAZON-RDS-PRIVATE-IPADDRESS:3306 -N ec2-usr@YOUR-AMAZON-EC2-INSTANCE-PUBLIC-ADDRESS

Note: YOURAMAZONRDSPRIVATEIPADDRESS needs to be the AWS internal RDS IP Address – not the external hostname

You can then connect to RDS using mysql commands or any GUI tool such as MySQL Workbench via localhost:33060

Thanks to: Dirk Taggesell via AWS Forums