efficient, performant data store
Amazon Redshift is our Data Warehouse, where we store our processed data (Hot data) for various initiatives like BI, Analytics, …
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift
Overview
Reviews
Reviewer Pros & Cons
View all pros & cons
Sameera Srivastava
Analytics Lead
Monotype Solutions India (Information Technology & Services, 10,001+ employees)
- [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to ma...
- [Amazon] Redshift has a concept of "Vacuum", which is an operation to claim the disk space back from deleted data/tables. They recently started doing ...
Pricing
View all pricingRedshift Managed Storage
$0.24
Cloud
per GB per month
Current Generation
$0.25 - $13.04
Cloud
per hour
Previous Generation
$0.25 - $4.08
Cloud
per hour
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
Features Scorecard
No scorecards have been submitted for this product yet.Start a Scorecard.
Product Details
What is Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
Amazon Redshift Technical Details
| Deployment Types | SaaS |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Alternatives
View all alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
What is Amazon Redshift's best feature?
Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 9.9.
Who uses Amazon Redshift?
The most common users of Amazon Redshift are from Mid-size Companies and the Computer Software industry.
Reviews and Ratings
(168)
Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 168)- Popular Filters
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
August 09, 2021
efficient, performant data store
Amazon Redshift is our Data Warehouse, where we store our processed data (Hot data) for various initiatives like BI, Analytics, DataScience, etc
We also use Amazon Redshift Spectrum as our Data Lake, where we store raw (un-processed) data (Cold data) for historical analysis, trends, etc
We store various standard data in Redshift like:
Bronze (ETL-ed data),
Silver (Materialized Views data), and
Gold (Rollups/Aggregated/Dashboard-ready data) in [Amazon] Redshift
We also use Amazon Redshift Spectrum as our Data Lake, where we store raw (un-processed) data (Cold data) for historical analysis, trends, etc
We store various standard data in Redshift like:
Bronze (ETL-ed data),
Silver (Materialized Views data), and
Gold (Rollups/Aggregated/Dashboard-ready data) in [Amazon] Redshift
- [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.
- Amazon Redshift is a Managed Service. But it is Not a 100% managed service. We still need to configure it with WLM (Work Load Management) settings, and add Query Queues to make sure it's resources aren't wasted and it is performant at it's best state, all the time
- [Amazon] Redshift has a concept of "Vacuum", which is an operation to claim the disk space back from deleted data/tables. They recently started doing automated vacuuming. Prior to that we had to do that at regular intervals, to claim the data back.
November 09, 2021
Powerful Data Management Tool
Amazon Redshift is primarily used as a data management solution by Product Analytics Group. We currently have various sources of capturing data like Heap, Delighted, Salesforce and it is convenient to build an ETL from these sources to Redshift. This enables us to merge all these data sources into single view in a BI tool like Power BI
- Ease of setting up ETL
- Uploading data into Redshift via AWS
- Querying is quick
- Missing option to restrict duplicate records
- Lacks complex data sets like udf
- Does not offer UI based querying & visualisation option like Looker
July 30, 2021
Perfect tool for a data analyst
I am working with an insurance client where a lot of claims and policy data comes in every day, we use amazon redshift to perform ETL and analyze the data to gain business insights.
Amazon redshift is an integral part of our data analysis.
Amazon redshift is an integral part of our data analysis.
- Amazon redshift is super quick due to its Massive parallel processing
- Amazon Redshift is compatible with many visualization tools which helps visualize the insights
- Amazon redshift has almost 0 downtime and allows for a massive store of data
- Since Redshift is a part of a larger AWS ecosystem, connecting with other resources is never a problem
- Amazon redshift could have more detailed documentation including practical examples
- Amazon redshift still lacks some of the advanced concepts which are possible with MS-SQL and others
- It should have a feature where users can visualize the data stored for a better understanding
April 02, 2021
Amazon Redshift Review
Amazon Redshift is a PostgreSQL based solution was seen as a drop-in replacement for several Postgres based databases (or schemas in Postgres parlance).
The eventual product: a Bill Inmon principles-based Data Warehouse served as a point or source of a single truth. It aided in decision making, historical outlooks and forecasting across various organizational verticals - the Finance, Marketing, and Medical Research. It was also possible to deliver data extracts to 3rd parties or visualize data on demand.
The eventual product: a Bill Inmon principles-based Data Warehouse served as a point or source of a single truth. It aided in decision making, historical outlooks and forecasting across various organizational verticals - the Finance, Marketing, and Medical Research. It was also possible to deliver data extracts to 3rd parties or visualize data on demand.
- Data retrieval experience really gets improved.
- In terms of database management, it is really a no management at all in AWS. There is no even an OS to take care or worry about.
- Auto or on-demand scaling is nice.
- Integrates quite well with other products within the AWS ecosystem.
- The number of connections is too small, I think at around 50 are allowed in parallel. With some ETL and apps connecting all the time, this brings an undesired possibility to some users or tools being unable to connect.
- Needs some tuning.
- The logging part is almost nonexistent.
- Can be quite costly in the long run as opposed to just RDS or on-prem/dedicated solutions.
We have decided to purchase Amazon Redshift since we started the project of building a new "data lake," so the first step was to decide which tool would be more appropriate to use as a data warehouse. Since we have everything on the cloud, we choose Amazon Redshift to connect our current tools on AWS and integrate the data.
- Data integration is very simple to perform
- The tool provides some advice that is very useful
- Their support is always complete and easygoing
- Their documentation could be even better
December 30, 2020
Redshift - it is not the destination it is journey !
Cloudwalker offers analytic services for the gambling industry. The gambling industry has vast amounts of data that are high speed and variability. Our services from Redshift help gambling companies have better control of their bookmaking product, have a complete view of customers betting history, helps with detecting problematic accounts, etc.
- Redshift has concurrency scaling helps serve more customers queries
- Redshift has automatic table compression having less disc space consumed comparing to other data warehouse solutions
- With ra3 new node types we can separate storage and compute
- Having automatic vacuum delete helps having conzisent performance in cases where data variability in dwh production zone is present
- Consistent service improvements from AWS: temporary tables, null handling in joins, single row inserts, materialized views
- Frequent changes of management console look and feel
- Automatic vacuum sort doesn't work for several billion rows tables
- Disc IOPS performance monitoring excluded
December 30, 2020
Redshift Review for you!
Amazon Redshift is being used by our whole organization. It is our primary tool for our data warehouse. We decided to switch to a cloud database because our in house servers just weren't able to keep up with our need for fast data delivery. We can adjust the speed up to where we need it to be and it has been very useful.
- Aggregation
- Extracting data
- postgres Based
- Could be faster
- Limited sql workbenches
- Expensive when speeding up the processing
January 20, 2021
Fly into the data warehousing world of AWS with Redshift
We use Amazon Redshift for our insights platform in our R&D space. Our team creates reports and dashboards on tools for business use. Amazon Redshift provides greater supply chain visibility, increased information on product movement, and high efficiency at a much faster rate.
- Robust as compared to traditional database/data warehouse
- Offers significant query speeds
- Low cost of ownership
- Provides MPP only for AWS-supported storages
- Prerequisites for configuring tables are not easy
- Not great for use with web apps
January 15, 2021
Redshift trumped Hive
It is used within a few departments. It is used to solve certain legacy problems that have not yet been ported over to other more suitable approaches.
- Large scale SQL
- Standard SQL
- Handline full text queries
- Sampling
- Bonafide indexes
- Provide query interface that can store queries and run long-running queries, then notify the user
December 30, 2020
Great Data Lake Solution
Amazon Redshift is being used by some departments of our company to bring solution to data warehouse. Our data center was not large and scalable enough to have big scale data warehouse. So we take Amazon Redshift as one of the data warehouses we use to help us in data transformation.
- It is very powerful, can hold anything you have.
- It is scalable. Small or big, it can help you.
- It is very fast. Can spin up cluster in minutes.
- As data warehouse, it does not support fast I/O.
- Learning can take more than expected.
- You are not managing your data 100%.
February 26, 2020
Amazon Redshift: Fastest but comes at a price
We are performing a POC (proof of concept) across multiple cloud vendors, and we have evaluated GCP, Azure, and Amazon. We plan to go on-site cloud from on-premises, and we will evaluate all databases across all cloud providers. We are making the current database over Amazon Redshift, if it can help us do the exact same job as we have on-premises SQL Server. The on-prem option is good for replication and security, and we are evaluating how good it can be on ML application support.
- Robust
- Great UI
- Price
- Implementation in non AWS server
My team is handling all the marking activities for all different product verticles for our company. We get a lot of streaming data that we focus on marketing. We also store this data carry out annual audits and aggregations to analyze our marketing progress. Amazon Redshift helped us with this, and it was a breeze enabling it in our environment as we were already on AWS.
- Replication is excellent, we did not have to worry about reliability.
- Their auto-scaling feature came to our rescue when it came to cost management.
- It became expensive over time as the data increased over time.
- It could not separate users from using the same infrastructure.
Amazon RedShift is used in all departments and accounts. This tool is newly integrated into the system so as to work with the data on the cloud. There are various projects which are moving from SQL servers to ARS because of its capacity of working and managing the data in the cloud.
- We can connect with multiple servers and can fetch the data easily from one server to other.
- It supports the syntax of the bots of the SQL servers, MS SQL and Oracle SQl. This makes it pretty handy to use.
- Here we use views instead of tables, so we can clearly see the flow of data.
- It works very slow in the cloud environment.
- No statistical inbuilt functions are available within the tool.
- Its user interface is not very attractive.
- Often it goes into deadlock state, which kills the running jobs.
June 18, 2019
Redshift is awesome!
1)ETL(Talend) data from source applications (Salesforce, Jira, OpenAir, NetSuite, Sharepoint, Active Directory, Office 365, etc.) to S3 bucket and from S3 bucket push data to Redshift (sync time is 10 minutes intervals. Data is available almost real-time only lagging 10 minutes).
2) All Department use it—Engineering, Sales, and Marketing.
3) As I said data is almost in real-time, so it is very useful for taking real-time decisions for upper management. We also reduced Salesforce licenses, because most of the users only used it to see reports. Now they are happy to used Redshift.
2) All Department use it—Engineering, Sales, and Marketing.
3) As I said data is almost in real-time, so it is very useful for taking real-time decisions for upper management. We also reduced Salesforce licenses, because most of the users only used it to see reports. Now they are happy to used Redshift.
- We reduced the number of Salesforce licenses— Engineering, Sales and Marketing guys are happy to query data from Redshift.
- Very fast to provide a huge data set with complicated measure.
- Some of the calculations failed in Salesforce. Redshift returns with the same calculations very fast.
- Very easy to maintain, no need to worry about hardware failure.
- We are not able to modify column size.
June 08, 2019
Amazon Redshift: easy, simple, fast
Capital One has many LOBs (line of businesses). I have supported IAM and Commercial LOB. They are using Redshift as a data warehouse solution. Oracle is not a Data Warehouse solution but was being used when the application was on on-premises. When they wanted to migrate all data to the Cloud, they chose Redshift as a solution to move the data from Oracle. Oracle is not a data warehouse solution. Redshift has been found as a good solution because of its unique features such as its MPP architecture, columnar architecture, and storage capacity.
- User-experience. The user wants something quick to view the output, rather than spending too much time
- preparing a code prior to seeing the output. Redshift provides SQL type queries. This makes any user happy and comfortable.
- Architecture is very straightforward and simple to understand, such as MPP architecture, Encryption, and Columnar database design. We can easily address issues and help others to understand.
- Scalability. We can scale-up and scale-down based on our workloads.
- Performance tuning and database optimization can be done using the system tables and advisors. These solutions are similar to the solution available for Oracle SQL Server. It makes it easy to do the optimization for queries and databases.
- The concurrency and scale up based on it could be improved. It would be good if it scale-up and scale-down the memory/CPU capacity automatically based on workload.
- Often we experience slow on queries and dashboards. Self-tuning option in WLM does help.
- Optimizing the areas such as Vacuum and reorganize the column data (sorting over time) automatically.
February 01, 2019
Amazon RedShift happy user
Amazon RedShift is used primarily by our in house data analytics and psychometric department. When we process the results of physician board certification exams we have a workflow which integrates the newly processed scoring data into RedShift which is used for analytical purposes. The data is denormalized and stored in a fashion which makes it overall more optimal for querying purposes. This data serves as the basis for final scoring calculations for a given exam. The data analytics department is then able to run their statistical analysis against the housed sets of data to ultimately determine the final test scores. We also house an "item bank" of exam questions from past exams which are used as the basis for future exams. Scoring is correlated to the item bank to help determine which questions performed well and which ones exam takers had difficulty with. RedShift is a great tool for our IT department because it helps share the responsibility of having to secure such sensitive data. Amazon is a company which we feel very confident with and RedShift has proven to be extremely robust and fast. It is nice to be able to so easily perform backups of data and rest more assured that it is in a safe form and not something which our own IT department has to manage along with all of our internally hosted transactional databases.
- Extremely fast querying allowing for concurrent analysis.
- PostgreSQL syntax which allows for developers with a SQL background to easily begin working with the data.
- Multiple output formats including JSON.
- Safe, easy, and reliable backups.
- SQL syntax support is not 100% which can lead to frustrating situations when developing a query.
- No support for database keys.
- No stored procedure support.
October 12, 2018
A hands-free data warehouse
We use Amazon Redshift and Redshift Spectrum for our data warehouse. Our production transactional datastores are continuously replicated to Redshift and transformed into fact tables. Redshift is maintained by the data team, but it is used by analysts on most teams, including business intelligence, product, and customer support. Redshift is our source of truth; it provides information about business processes that the team needs to make decisions.
- Redshift is fully managed. Small teams do not have the resources to maintain a cluster. CloudWatch metrics are provided out-of-the-box, and it is easy to configure alarms.
- Redshift's console allows you to easily inspect and manage queries, and manage the performance of the cluster.
- Redshift is ubiquitous; many products (e.g., ETL services) integrate with it out-of-the-box.
- Writing .csvs to S3 and querying them through Redshift Spectrum is convenient.
- 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.
November 26, 2018
Great for "Big Data" -- but not so much otherwise
Redshift is currently being used to house normalized client data pulled from various third-party endpoints. It houses the data that is both being accessed directly by our business intelligence and CRM platform, as well as made available via our own API gateways. It was chosen for its ability to support a "big data" environment with high availability.
- If you need draw insights from immense amounts (see: petabytes) of transactional (repetitive) data in near real time--think machine learning and business intelligence--and you're already in the AWS ecosystem, then it's your only real option. It performs very well.
- Highly configurable, intelligent compression of repetitive columns reduces your memory footprint, lending to extremely high performance.
- As with most things in the AWS ecosystem, it scales seamlessly and endlessly.
- There is no support for data de-duplication; meaning this has to be either accounted for upstream, or you'll have to build your own services to de-dupe your data.
- It's strength is housing data, not necessarily data insertions. While it has an SQL-like interface, it shouldn't be approached the same as a typical relational database.
- Permissions can be a pain... dovetailing on my previous "con" , in some instances it's easier to drop/rebuild a table than try to navigate incremental updates/insertions, but retaining user-permissions is a pain-point.
We use Amazon Redshift as our data warehouse. We store our most used datasets on Redshift. Some of the data transformations are also made on Redshift but we try to avoid to do the heavy transformation there. Our dashboarding tool sits on top of Redshift and runs queries on every dashboard load. Analysts are using Redshift all day as the main source of data. Data savvy engineers and product managers have read access.
- It is easy to use. SQL is one of the easiest languages to learn.
- Fast. Especially if you use an SSD cluster.
- Scalable. If you need more space for your data or want faster results you can add more nodes.
- It is PostgreSQL. I miss some commands and procedural features.
- It is perfect for analytics purposes, but not fast enough for web apps.
- Too expensive for ETL processing.
February 01, 2018
On-prem DW to Redshift
Amazon Redshift is being used by several of our clients for analysis of large datasets. In most cases, it is used at a department level, in conjunction with other on-prem and in the cloud data solutions, including data warehouses and relational databases.
- Very fast, parallelized data loading from S3
- Full ANSI SQL support
- Highly scalable
- Columnar storage
- Does not scale automatically. Need to be scaled up/down manually by adding/removing nodes
- Does not have support for row level access control
- Charged based on provisioned capacity - not based on usage
September 13, 2017
After Four Months with Redshift
Amazon Redshift is being used by many business units within our company. It is our new data warehousing platform.
- Redshift seems to be as fast processing a large dataset as it is with a small one. It seems, when the dataset size is significantly increased (10x, 100x, 1000x, etc.), DML queries are often executed within the same amount of time.
- Redshift has a powerful graphical admin tool to monitor the ongoing queries in real time and historically.
- Easily expandable capacity. Automatic snapshots that eliminate the need for managing backups. Simple database maintenance strategies with the VACUUM and ANALYZE commands.
- Abundance of detailed documentation and tutorials.
- It could benefit from adding data integrity and programming tools common to other database management systems.
- Amazon Redshift is based on PostgreSQL 8.0.2. That version of PostgreSQL was released in December 2006. While PostgreSQL was much improved since then, the new features were not implemented in Redshift. Many basic features are missing from it.
- Primary keys can be declared but not enforced. Referential integrity (foreign keys) can be declared but not enforced. UNIQUE and CHECK constraints are not supported and cannot be declared.
- IDENTITY can be declared on a column, and Redshift will put unique values into it. However: IDENTITY values in the newly inserted rows won’t be incremental or sequential. To implement a sequential number, you need to write your own custom code.
- There are no stored procedures in Redshift. We are writing SQL script files, and then parsing and running them one statement at a time from a Python program. This also enabled us to implement execution-time error logging.
- In SQL scripts, to check for the row count of affected rows, a complicated join query against some system tables or views has to be executed.
- Data Control Language (DCL) does not exist. No statements like IF, WHILE, DO, RAISERROR, etc.
- On performance of views… Views do not “pass-through” a query parameter which is a potential problem for performance.
- When selecting against a view with the WHERE clause outside of the view, the inner query of the view will be executed first without consideration for the WHERE clause, and only then the WHERE clause will be applied.
- Certain clauses of SQL work many times faster than other clauses. So be careful and test your statements for performance earlier rather than later, especially if working with a large data set.
- There was a situation when DELETE FROM JOIN was unacceptably slow. Replacing JOIN with the USING clause made DELETE instantaneous.
October 12, 2017
Scalable and cost-effective data warehousing tool
Redshift is one of the most scalable yet simple data warehousing tools. It is not only used within the engineering team but widely used by the business team too. One of the major use cases are to power the dashboards and reports which are in looker. It helped to migrate from the traditional email reports to dynamic dashboards and reports which can be shared to various end users and businesses. It helped in faster data retrieval and can scale well with ease.
- Scalability with less downtime.
- Performance optimization without affecting the business i.e zero downtime during optimization
- Powerful yet simple to use. Very easy to optimize and improve performance during the regular read/write operations
- No need of DBA to operate and maintain Redshift as it is a completely managed data warehousing tool
- Good customer support and will respond in very quick time with clear information and documentation
- Well documented commands
- Can propose better optimization techniques based on the business use case.
- Can provide option to set the upper bound on number of connections to cluster
- Can improve on optimized writes/updates
August 01, 2016
Great data warehouse for the money!
Amazon Redshift is used as the central data warehouse. It's main use is for data analytics and reporting. In addition, it is also used by batch jobs to perform various business functions like email lists of delinquent customers.
- Fast analytical queries. The shared nothing and column oriented architecture makes querying very quick compared to databases like Oracle that are designed for OLTP. Scaling is a synch since you can scale out by adding more nodes.
- Easy table modelling. The only tough decisions you have to make are what your distribution schemes and sort keys are going to be. This is a lot easier than defining partition and index schemes in databases like Oracle or MySQL.
- Not much maintenance. Almost everything is managed by Amazon. The only exception is table vacuuming and analysis. I was able to program simple ETL jobs to perform this.
- Works with pretty much anything that works with Postgres. It's hard to find a tool that it isn't compatible with.
- Lack of enforced constraints (except NOT NULL column constraints). You have to be very careful in your testing to make sure that you aren't duplicating rows.
- No stored procedure support. Everything must be accomplished through ETL
- Write operations are very slow and complex.Native SQL row level INSERT and UPDATE statements take an extremely long time to execute. In order to get around this for external data that needs to be loaded, you have to bulk load the data from a flat file to a stage table, then upsert the data from the stage table to your destination table. For data already present in the database, ELT is the only viable way of transforming the data.
- No good native data modelling tools.
- Random nondescript errors happen occasionally. The error messages are not decipherable and forums will have no clues as to what happened. It is just a fact of life.
- No trigger support.
- OLTP style queries are painfully slow. Don't even think about using Redshift for OLTP...
November 30, 2019
Redshift Review
Amazon Redshift was our enterprise data warehouse as a backend to our BI solutions.
- Fixed cost.
- Tunable table design.
- Need to provision warehouse for highest capacity.
- No real separation between computing and storage (even when considering Spectrum).
- All users share the same infrastructure resulting in frequent 100% utilization error messages.
- A leader node can become a bottleneck for too many concurrent aggregate queries.
September 27, 2019
Redshift is way too easy!
Redshift is our data warehouse used by our organization. It takes data from different sources and put them together in Redshift for our Analytics team to diagnose.
- Since it's part of AWS it is fairly quick and easy to set up.
- You can add nodes fairly quick to expand the data needs.
- Performance from the analytics reports accessing Redshift is really good.
- Better database management when looking up table metadata or sizes of tables.
- Need a better query analyzer.
- Finding errors during a data load can be a little daunting at times.