Redshift review for the analytics environment
August 10, 2016
Redshift review for the analytics environment
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Redshift
It is used as the analytics data SOT (source of truth). All company data, whether from product, marketing, sales, etc., gets synced to Redshift where it can be easily analyzed by analysts. Redshift provides a good tradeoff between the ability to store a lot of data and perform quick and flexible queries on it.
Pros
- Flexible, OLAP queries.
- Fast query time (in the order of seconds for most).
- Standard SQL language.
- Fast ways to insert more data.
Cons
- VACUUM is a pain, its unclear exactly how often it needs to be done.
- Redshift has a limit on how many concurrent writes and reads you can do that won't scale to 100s of people using it.
- Redshift lacks some Postgres queries that make some standard SQL operations hard.
- Allowed us to easily analyze business operations and facilitate A/B testing.
- Allowed us to quickly answer complex questions about the company's data.
- Took a lot of work to fix some issues once we got to the limits of its usability (specifically, we had too many writes).
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.
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