Likelihood to Recommend If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
Read full review High-performance, high-concurrency transactions are well suited for ASE. ASE is lacking some features in my opinion such as history tables, however there are ways to implement them via workarounds or by using Replication Server. I do think the way the ASE parser and optimizer works are far superior to other products as it is a true cost-based optimizer and the order of the tables in the FROM clause does not really matter although a good SQL coder will place the tables in a meaningful order to make the SQL more readable. ASE is good for applications that require high availability and can be used for mission critical systems.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Pros [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results. [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store. [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance. Read full review Easy to setup and maintain Reliable, rarely has major hiccups requiring reboots or crashes Very responsive with complicated queries spanning various tablespaces and hundreds of millions of rows Read full review Cons We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch. Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types. Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables. Read full review Full database encryption - need to utilize external keys vs internal - for better separation of duties. History Tables. Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Likelihood to Renew Our licenses are perpetual. It is the support that we will be renewing. We will renew because we continue to use and receive value from the product.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Usability Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.
Read full review It does almost everything we need and for the things it doesn't do natively, we are still able to do using other features. For example, natively history tables weren't supported but we were able to create them using triggers.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Support Rating The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
Read full review Incredibly responsive, saving us countless hours in troubleshooting.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Than
Vertica : Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than
Hive :
Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.
Read full review Much less effort than Oracle. Much better customer support than Oracle. Roughly equivalent to SQL Server in performance and ease of use. Much better customer service than SQL Server. Different ballpark from IQ. Same customer service.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.
Read full review Return on Investment Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost. Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time. Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift. Read full review Negative - Costs a lot ... but so do they all. Positive - It does what we need it to do. Read full review ScreenShots