Amazon SageMaker vs Amazon Redshift

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon SageMaker is a great tool for developing machine learning models that take more effort than just point-and-click type of analyses. The software works well with the other tools in the Amazon ecosystem, so if you use Amazon Web Services or are thinking about it, SageMaker would be a great addition. SageMaker is great for consumer insights, predictive analytics, and looking for gems of insight in the massive amounts of data we create. SageMaker is less suitable for analysts who do generally "small" data analyses, and "small" data analyses in today's world can be billions of records.

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Thomas Young

Owner, previous CEO

Econometric StudiosFinancial Services, 11-50 employees

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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)

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Arthur Zubarev

Senior Business Intelligence Consultant

SermoResearch, 201-500 employees

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Pros

Provides enough freedom for experienced data scientists and also for those who just need things done without going much deeper into building models.
Customization and easy to alter and change.
If you already are an Amazon user, you do not need to transition over to another software.

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Verified User

Employee in Human Resources

Real Estate Company, 1001-5000 employees

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[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.

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Narayan Motamarri

Staff Data Engineer

Hearst AutosMarketing & Advertising, 501-1000 employees

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Cons

The UI can be eased up a bit for use by business analysts and non technical users
For huge amount of data pull from legacy solutions, the platform lags a bit
Considering ML is an emerging topic and would be used by most of the organizations in future, the pipeline integrations can be optimized

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Verified User

Consultant in Marketing

Marketing & Advertising Company, 201-500 employees

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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.

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Gavin Hackeling

Data Scientist

Wonder (AskWonder.com)Research, 11-50 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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Amazon SageMaker Editions & Modules

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Additional Pricing Details

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General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$0 per hour

Amazon Redshift Editions & Modules

Edition

Current Generation	$0.25 - $13.04¹
Previous Generation	$0.25 - $4.08¹
Redshift Spectrum	$5.00²
Redshift Managed Storage	$0.24³

per hour
per terabyte of data scanned
per GB per month

Additional Pricing Details

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

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Amazon Redshift 10.0

Based on 9 answers

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.

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Brendan McKenna

Senior Developer

American Board of Internal MedicineNon-Profit Organization Management, 201-500 employees

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Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

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Amazon Redshift 9.2

Based on 12 answers

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

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Financial Services Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon SageMaker comes with other supportive services like S3, SQS, and a vast variety of servers on EC2. It's very comfortable to manage the process and also support the end application by one click hosting option. Also, it charges on the base of what you use and how long you use it, so it becomes less costly compared to others.

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Verified User

Employee in Research & Development

Computer Software Company, 501-1000 employees

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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.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Contract Terms and Pricing Model

No score

No answers yet

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Amazon Redshift 10.0

Based on 1 answer

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.

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Sameera Srivastava

Analytics Lead

Monotype Solutions IndiaInformation Technology & Services, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

We have been able to deliver data products more rapidly because we spend less time building data pipelines and model servers.
We can prototype more rapidly because it is easy to configure notebooks to access AWS resources.
For our use-cases, serving models is less expensive with SageMaker than bespoke servers.

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Gavin Hackeling

Data Scientist

Wonder (AskWonder.com)Research, 11-50 employees

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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.

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Michael Romm

Principal Data Architect

IntuitComputer Software, 5001-10,000 employees

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