title: How do you access RDS databases from AWS
body: <p>I'm looking at the AWS API and I can't seem to find a method to help me get info on an existing RDS database.  I also tried to use a method that gets a list of all the RDS databases but failed at that too.</p>
  
  <p>I looked at 2 methods and apparently they aren't what I'm looking for or I'm using them wrong.</p>
  
  <p>Method 1:
  I looked at ModifyDBInstanceRequest, to see if I could specify the name of an existing database and if I could query it for its properties (mysql version, storage size, etc.)
  The following piece of code didn't do as I expected.  ad-dash-test is an existing db in RDS.  When I ran my code, it said the engine version is null, even though this is an existing db and I specified it by its DB Instance name.</p>
  
  <pre><code>  ModifyDBInstanceRequest blah = new ModifyDBInstanceRequest("ad-dash-test");
  
    System.out.println("the engine ver is " + blah.getEngineVersion());
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Method 2:
  I tried using the DescribeDBInstancesResult method but it looks like it's used for newly created RDS databases, not existing ones.</p>
  
  <pre><code>  DescribeDBInstancesResult db = new DescribeDBInstancesResult();
    List&lt;DBInstance&gt; list = db.getDBInstances();
    System.out.println("list length = " + list.size());
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The list length that returns is 0 and I have 8 RDS instances.</p>
  
  <p>I didn't find any examples in Amazon's SDK for RDS and using my logic and the API docs didn't seem to help.  Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.  Thanks in advance for your help.</p>