RDS Frequently Asked Questions :
A direct upgrade from MySQL 5.1 to MySQL 5.5 is currently not supported.
so you have to do it in a more traditional way.
For example, a simplified approach would be to start an instance of RDS 5.5 and transfer the 5.1 database to it as follows:
mysqldump -h mysql5.1.database.host database_name|mysql -h mysql5.5.database.host
then switch to using instance 5.5.
Of course, this will be slow for a large database, and you will need to avoid writing to the original database during the transition.
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