Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
$0.24
per GB per month
SingleStore
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
SingleStore aims to deliver the world’s fastest distributed SQL database for data-intensive applications: SingleStoreDB, which combines transactional + analytical workloads in a single platform.
The in-memory tech is the best in class. If perf. is the hard limit then this is the No.1 to go. When data scales up, the cost of maintaining a big cluster with memory keep increasing (both the infrastructure cost and licensing cost) becomes high. Also the balance between …
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)
Our workload is 100% analytical. We also have to ingest a lot of data each month. SingleStore is a perfect match for our needs because it has fast pipelines for data ingestion and great performance, even in large and complex queries. We need fast response times for our user interface and great performance in our ETL processes, which are rather complicated. SingleStore handles all of this very well.
[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.
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.
We wish the product had better support for High Availability of the aggregator. Currently the indexes generated by the two different aggregators are not in the same sequential space and so our apps have more burden to deal with HA.
More tools for debugging issues such as high memory usage would be good.
The price was the one that kept us away from purchasing for the first few years. Now we are able to afford due to a promotion that gives it at 25% of the list price. Not sure if we'll continue after the promotion offer expires in another 2 years.
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.
[Until it is] supported on AWS ECS containers, I will reserve a higher rating for SingleStore. Right now it works well on EC2 and serves our current purpose, [but] would look forward to seeing SingleStore respond to our urge of feature in a shorter time period with high quality and security.
SingleSore can perform transactions and operational analytics together in order to utilize their data and transform their business. SingleStore delivers a database that performs both functions. Before using SingleStore, we had different systems for OLTP queries and for OLAP analyses, and a number of ETL packages to bring data from the OLTP system to Reporting database.
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
Very responsive to trouble tickets - Often, I think, the SingleStore's monitoring systems have already alerted the engineers by the time I get around to writing a ticket (about 10 - 20 mins after we see a problem). I feel like things are escalated nicely and SingleStore takes resolving trouble tickets seriously. Also SingleStore follows up after incidents to with a post mortem and actionable takaways to improve the product. Very satisfied here.
We allowed 2-3 months for a thorough evaluation. We saw pretty quickly that we were likely to pick SingleStore, so we ported some of our stored procedures to SingleStore in order to take a deeper look. Two SingleStore people worked closely with us to ensure that we did not have any blocking problems. It all went remarkably smoothly.
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.
Vertica, Snowflake, SQL Server, Azure Data Warehouse, PowerBI, Aerospike, etc. From what I've seen MemSQL is well worth the cost when latency and data freshness needs are high, i.e. you need a lot of queries to run with UI latency (the query itself takes less than a second or so), with very fresh streaming fact and dimensional data. It will be more expensive per "unit of performance" but if you need that performance then it'll get the job done.
On-prem Vertica (note, not Eon) provides more knobs for optimizing a particular data set and set of queries against it and performs as well or better in a single table, fact table queries. It will also scale to data size more cheaply due to its on-disk model. For large queries against large data sets where data freshness isn't as important (and latency either is or isn't), I'd take Vertica, although if you need to do a lot of joins that will struggle). However, as they still are exclusively columnar, dimension table updates, and recalls based on them, can only be tuned to happen so fast (we could do much better than 10 seconds with 10-100 updates per second for raw replication, and Vertica's joins are always slow so recalls were worse).
Snowflake suffers similarly to Vertica in the data freshness, replication, and re-calc area; SF also doesn't give as many knobs to turn as Vertica for data set optimization but seems to be better at joins. If you have a lot of queries to run against a lot of data and joins are limited, you need query latency low and consistent but you don't need a ton of freshness, I'd stick with Vertica. If joins matter more, or you can accept notably-but-not-terribly worse performance, then Snowflake is fine and cheaper from what we've seen. (Again, I can't speak to SF vs Vertica Eon).
SQL Server and ADW we couldn't get to perform as well as the other options, but I'll say we didn't try that hard on those.
Aerospike is amazing as a KV store; however for OLAP use cases where you want to balance performance against the flexibility of queries against general event (time series) data (i.e. be able to roll up to different grains) then KV becomes challenging.
PBI is great if you want an integrated BI tool, but if you want an OLAP solution to build against, with some particular scale or performance needs to be mentioned above, I'd go with one of these other solutions. It really can be great for letting non-tech folks build relatively small data sets and quick insights for customers (internal or external), great leverage in that case.
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.
As the overall performance and functionality were expanded, we are able to deliver our data much faster than before, which increases the demand for data.
Metadata is available in the platform by default, like metadata on the pipelines. Also, the information schema has lots of metadata, making it easy to load our assets to the data catalog.
