Killing a thread or query of MySQL running on RDS

When you run a MySQL instance on RDS and want to kill a thread or a query for some reason, you’ll find you cannot use KILL or mysqladmin kill because you don’t have a permission to do so.

RDS provides the stored procedures named mysql.rds_kill and mysql.rds_kill_query which will kill a thread and a query respectively. To kill a thread, first use SHOW PROCESSLIST to get the list of threads and find the id of the thread you want to kill. Assuming the thread id is 53512, then use CALL mysql.rds_kill(53512) to kill the thread.