RSMeans data, from Gordian (formerly Costworks) is a construction and estimation software offering acquired by the Gordian Group in 2014. It includes cost books and construction project estimating software tools.
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Amazon Redshift
Score8.9 out of 10
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Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
Well Suited: Construction cost estimates for new larger projects where the construction will start within the next 6-9 months. Budgetary estimates for future buildings through its square foot models. Not Well Suited: Not accurate enough on small projects where labor, travel to sites, and OH&P are a higher percentage of unit costs than on larger projects where these costs are spread out across more units.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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)
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
CostWorks is very good at generating quick and valid estimates for standardized facilities such as office buildings, schools, etc. It allows you to validate other cost estimates at the UniFormat level when doing an estimate validation.
CostWorks' database of detailed line-items is a very resourceful asset when it comes to finding a very specific line-item. Sometimes, when using Success or MII, I will have CostWorks open on the other screen so I can find an item that the other softwares just don't have and build it into the other software from the CostWorks entry.
CostWorks does a very good job of generating reports that are both well-developed and have enough detail at the summary level to be able to sit with a client or a project manager and have them follow along and understand without being overwhelmed with detail and numbers.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
[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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
CostWorks is a unique software for estimating as compared to the other softwares I have listed above. PACES is mostly used for federal modeling and really cannot be compared to Costworks. It has its own developed modeling database and has its own quirkiness and issues. MII has been developed for the USACE and utilized a user-developed folder structure and RS Means Database. I use CostWorks along side this software to find line-items that are not in the MII RS Means Database. Success has been developed for NAVFAC and again, utilizes a user-developed folder structure and RS Means Database. When I use this software, I ALWAYS have CostWorks open on the other screen as Success' RS Means database is extremely lacking when it comes to the number of detail line-items. Timberline is by SAGE and I use it mostly for DOS and FAA work. Of the 3 RS Means Database softwares, this one has the most detailed database for reference, however, there are times when I do have to look up an item that Timberline does not have and the first software I open is CostWorks.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I don't really see any "negative" impacts on my business or my ROI by purchasing CostWorks. It's a valuable tool that we use, however, some of my colleagues do not use it or use it very infrequently.
I find it well worth the cost even though we don't develop complete estimates in CostWorks due to client dictated softwares.
It has provided very quickly-built estimating models that let our team and project managers know that the RFP or the task that they are contemplating bidding on or starting to work on is actually feasible to construction given the budget and directive.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
