get started with columnar databases easily with AWS Redshift
August 05, 2016
get started with columnar databases easily with AWS Redshift
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Redshift
(JSON) events emitted from platform/web services are transformed and loaded into AWS Redshift in order to support analysis and reporting for our solution.
- AWS infrastructure and support simplifies maintenance and administration
- familiarity with PostgreSQL makes adopting Redshift as a column store easier
- columnar data store allows for high performance queries on large volumes of data
- there are some situations where having a column store more closely integrated as part of our platform would be better
- AWS costs can add up
- many other (open source) column stores have new and interesting features not (yet) available in Redshift
- Redshift has enabled us to expose more of our product and business performance data which was previously not accessible or reportable.
- We can now make data driven decisions for our business.
Redshift may have the lowest barrier to entry for adopting any columnar database. This is mainly due to (1) the ease of use (signup/setup/etc) common to many Amazon Web Services and (2) since Redshift started as a fork of PostgreSQL (8.4) this eases the transition from RDBMS (principles/semantics/etc) to columnar databases. Once you gain an understanding of columnar databases and the use-cases for which they are a good fit, you'll be in a much better position to evaluate the many emerging (and compelling) alternatives available (especially those that are free and open source)