Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) vs. Amazon Redshift

Amazon Relational Database Service is a perfect fit for everyone who is seeking for an high-performance cloud-based database service. No matter if Postgres, Oracle, or any other type of relational database. Amazon RDS is our first choice for any kind of database requirement in the cloud. Especially I like the scalability.

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)

Incentivized

• Automated Database Management: We use it for streamlining routine tasks like software patching and database backups.
• Scalability on Demand: we use it to handle traffic spikes, scaling both vertically and horizontally.
• Database Engine Compatibility: It works amazingly with multiple database engines used by different departments within our organization including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle.
• Monitoring: It covers our extensive monitoring and logging, and also has great compatibility with Amazon CloudWatch

Incentivized

• [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.

Incentivized

• It is a little difficult to configure and connect to an RDS instance. The integration with ECS can be made more seamless.
• Exploring features within RDS is not very easy and intuitive. Either a human friendly documentation should be added or the User Interface be made intuitive so that people can explore and find features on their own.
• There should be tools to analyze cost and minimize it according to the usage.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We do renew our use of Amazon Relational Database Service. We don't have any problems faced with RDS in place. RDS has taken away lot of overhead of hosting database, managing the database and keeping a team just to manage database. Even the backup, security and recovery another overhead that has been taken away by RDS. So, we will keep on using RDS.

Incentivized

I've been using AWS Relational Database Services in several projects in different environments and from the AWS products, maybe this one together to EC2 are my favourite. They deliver what they promise. Reliable, fast, easy and with a fair price (in comparison to commercial products which have obscure license agreements).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

the online training & digital content available on the web from AWS was having sufficient information to deploy and run the service

Incentivized

In a few words, we are just to confortable working with oracle and sql server. Using RDS add another layer of distributed database in order to backup everything we have in case of a disaster and also complies with authorities locally and internacionally. All database we use, are local in custom servers that we maintain, but we agree to expand this.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• RDS is costly and thus small business should avoid it as it might not be worthful (in ROI perspective)
• Downtime is very low and there are automated backups thus we dont have to worry much about technical stuff and can focus more on marketing and sales
• Due to various automated features such as automated backup etc we dont need a huge technical team thus reducing the cost of maintaining a huge technical team ,

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized