Datasite Diligence is a sell-side virtual data room offering rigorous security and seamless collaboration. Users can categorize and redact with AI, track tasks, answer questions, and analyze progress.
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Amazon Redshift
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
Datasite is well suited for organizing large quantities of a variety of documents into folders. It is not as well suited for Xcel, which generally requires downloading in order to review, but there are quick preview options for Word and PDF items.
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)
User-friendly interface. We download datarooms for a single deal over 30+ times per deal (as the dataroom gets updated), so the interface being easy to access / navigate is extremely important.
Features: Datasite Diligence Virtual Data Room gives great tools beyond just downloading a dataroom. Easy notifications when something gets downloaded, two factor authentication, ability to search data room or filter for recently uploaded files, etc.
Organization: A lot of data rooms do not allow you to keep organized file paths. When you download a dataroom it often looses all the index folder names. Datasite Diligence Virtual Data Room keeps files extremely organized and is always available.
[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.
Major feature I noticed in other datarooms that's missing in Datasite Diligence Virtual Data Room is bulk download feature. I can select multiple files/folders under a parent folder, however, I would like to be able to download selected files/folders from among multiple folders.
Another feature I'd love to see is a "New*" menu item in Q&A, just like we have in the Documents section correctly. I know I can still use the date to filter the latest answered questions, but having the "New" option makes it a lot easier to do a quick filter. My idea is that this option will show all activity that I haven't looked at since my last login, irrespective of date.
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.
It is my go to data room provider and I am super comfortable using it. I don't think I would want to use anything else since I can't trust them like I can trust Datasite
Tough to figure out at first but after using the platform for some time, you can get used to Datasite Diligence Virtual Data Room pretty quickly. Would be great to have more of a tutorial up front to better be able to navigate the software, especially starting off as the data dealt with is sensitive.
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.
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
The indexing, file structure and document viewing are better in Datasite than each of the others. It's also easier to download or open documents in a new tab (vs. in browser) and easier to search and do targeted bulk downloads in Datasite.
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.
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.
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.
