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Amazon Redshift Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.7 out of 10
Score
8.7 out of 10

Reviews

38 Reviews

High Performance Data Warehouse

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Amazon Redshift as a warehousing solution, where we are doing multiple ETL sync from clickstream events as well as transaction DBs.

We are doing analytics on the top this data and utilise this data to build and train data-science models.

We are in gaming industry we are solving business problem such as increasing the number of user gameplay, increasing the revenue, increasing the registration as well as the acquisition.

Pros

  • Fast data retrieval from the table with complex joins via columnar storage and advanced query optimization techniques like parallel execution
  • Great reliable integration with AWS MSK using Amazon Redshift Streaming a low-latency streaming ingestion, AWS Glue and S3
  • Concurrency scaling and work load management - helps in segregating the load distribution based on roles
  • Decoupled storage and compute using RA3 instance type
  • Distribute cluster using Amazon Redshift data sharing i.e centralised write cluster with multiple readonly cluster

Cons

  • Data governance can be better
  • Data catalog and data discovery
  • Data lineage

Likelihood to Recommend

For data integration using Amazon MSK and seemless integration with Transaction DB.

Faster data retrieval with complex joins as well as it is giving functionality to add dist key as well as sort key to make the performance better.

Vacuum and Analyse command for improvement is the cheery on the top.

Give a chance to Amazon Redshift (It worths)

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Amazon Redshift as our main data warehouse to store most of our data, the whole process consists in extract the data from different sources, we do some transformations when needed and the data is finally stored in Amazon Redshift in order to be used afterward by one of our Business Intelligence tools.

Pros

  • Easy setup (if you are on AWS Cloud Environment, just few clicks)
  • Easy learn (Good documentation)
  • Speed

Cons

  • It could bring some more features like we do have in Snowflake (Mainly the UI)

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for a data warehouse where you don't need to worry about maintenance and scalability, Amazon Redshift should be one of your options once it is a self-managed data warehouse with many connectors and easy usage as well. Besides that, if your environment runs on AWS, it is even easier to integrate.

Vetted Review
Amazon Redshift
4 years of experience

Amazon Redshift, a good solution for data warehousing

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon Redshift for structured data warehousing. It allows us to store, retrieve, and analyze large volumes of structured data quickly and efficiently. It is used to support decision-making, identify trends, and gain insights into the business. Furthermore, we use Amazon Redshift can be used to create dashboards, generate reports, and perform ad-hoc queries on data to support business intelligence and analytics efforts. We also use it to support our customer service applications or fraud detection systems

Pros

  • Data warehousing
  • Business intelligence
  • Data insights

Cons

  • Cost can be prohibitive
  • User interface could be more intuitive

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Redshift is well-suited for a variety of scenarios where businesses need to store, retrieve, and analyze large volumes of structured data. Some specific scenarios where Amazon Redshift may be well-suited include: Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Data Migration as well as Real-Time Data Processing. On the other hand, Amazon Redshift may not be the most appropriate for unstructured data, organizations with low volume of data or Real-Time Stream Processing.

Vetted Review
Amazon Redshift
3 years of experience

Very good, but requires engg tuning

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use it as the data warehouse of our clients. I use it to build data transformations of user activity logs to ML features. I use the sql workbench to explore datasets and understand data schemas. Post that, I generally connect to the warehouse either through dbt or from jupyter notebooks.

Pros

  • Seamlessly integrates with the data in s3
  • Workbench provides useful way to query the tables within aws console
  • Postgres flavor of sql gives powerful capabilities such as window functions

Cons

  • Json support in sql is very limited.
  • Array type columns are missing. They are by default converted to strings
  • Sql workbench often goes unresponsive. I have to reload for the queries to run
  • A search option in the sql workbench would be great, which let's users search the whole db for a match on columns, tables etc

Likelihood to Recommend

It is a solid data warehouse on top of the AWS ecosystem. If most of your infra is on AWS, it makes good sense to go for it. But it is expected to be tuned well by a data engineer for an optimal performance. For a data scientist too, the SQL is a bit limited when it comes to unstructured columns in the tables. Arrays, jsons, etc have very poor support compared to other warehouses.

Powerful Data Management Tool

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Pros

  • Ease of setting up ETL
  • Uploading data into Redshift via AWS
  • Querying is quick

Cons

  • Missing option to restrict duplicate records
  • Lacks complex data sets like udf
  • Does not offer UI based querying & visualisation option like Looker

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited in scenarios where you have distributed data sources and would like to build an ETL pipeline with limited data engineering efforts. Operations time and cost is relatively low compared to other tools. Also it offers great connectivity with Heap with no technical know-how required. It is mostly self managed and reliable.

efficient, performant data store

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Pros

  • [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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

[Amazon] Redshift is suited for various use cases like Time series data, Structured / relational data, Semi structured data like JSON, etc.

[Amazon] Redshift might not work 100% well with full performance, for Graph DB use cases.

Perfect tool for a data analyst

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • 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

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon redshift is best suited for data analysis and is not suited for transactions.

for eg. you can use amazon redshift to gain insights from a large data set but cannot use it to do a transaction level update and insert

Redshift trumped Hive

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Large scale SQL
  • Standard SQL

Cons

  • Handline full text queries
  • Sampling
  • Bonafide indexes
  • Provide query interface that can store queries and run long-running queries, then notify the user

Likelihood to Recommend

It's appropriate for ad hoc queries on semiorganized data.

Vetted Review
Amazon Redshift
3 years of experience

Fly into the data warehousing world of AWS with Redshift

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Robust as compared to traditional database/data warehouse
  • Offers significant query speeds
  • Low cost of ownership

Cons

  • Provides MPP only for AWS-supported storages
  • Prerequisites for configuring tables are not easy
  • Not great for use with web apps

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Redshift performs extremely well for reporting/analytics data and is way ahead of other competitors. The biggest challenge is migrating data from on-premises databases to Amazon Redshift. The initial hurdle is a major one.

Vetted Review
Amazon Redshift
5 years of experience

Redshift - it is not the destination it is journey !

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • Frequent changes of management console look and feel
  • Automatic vacuum sort doesn't work for several billion rows tables
  • Disc IOPS performance monitoring excluded

Likelihood to Recommend

Redshift is great data warehouse solution if you have several billion rows tables. More than 200 very important improvements were added in several years' time. With new Redshift instance types solution has separation of storage and compute and magnitude better query response times. Don't use Redshift if you have less than several billion rows tables.