Likelihood to Recommend Actian matrix is not good for small data sets. If you have a limited data pool, or do not plan on having multiple users/clients accessing a data source, stick with a more traditional relational database model - Access for the truly small user base, or a DB2 or Oracle back end if your going to have multiple users, and moderate sized data. Actian is for LARGE data sets (Big Data, in the industry parlance). Millions of rows of data from multiple sources with various down stream systems accessing the database. It is for data analytics of large data groups and intense data mining.
Read full review 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 Pros Super fast. Aggregate query such as SUM(), Count() returns result within seconds from a table with more than billion records. Excellent data compression. Easy maintenance. We managed this database without having a full time DBA. Support ANSI SQL and ODBC/JDBC. It's easy to connect to this database from other systems. Read full review [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 Cons Some of the bugs were annoying and QA definitely needs improvement Connectivity to Informatica and ETL providers Workload management could be better like when you compare with Teradata Read full review 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 Usability I wish to give higher rating for the speed and efficiency in handling the queries, but only 6 because of consistent bugs we encounter
Read full review 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 Support Rating Faster initial response Trained professionals Very helpful in resolving issues Read full review 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 Implementation Rating Leader failover setup is the toughest and lack of proper documentation is making things tough.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Actian Matrix is our first big data analytics storage platform, and as I was not involved in the POC process to compare it to other products out on the market, unfortunately I cannot say if it is better than other Big Data storage options. I can say that it out performs products such as Oracle or UDB in regards to the volume of data it can easily index and handle.
Read full review 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 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 ROI is great, less spending on full time DBA and that money could be use to add additional node. Negative - Not many developers are well aware of this tool, it takes some time to learn. Read full review 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 ScreenShots