Amazon Redshift Reviews

Column store and distributed processing is optimized for read access. We grew to 3000+ users with no impact.

Column store is a data compression technique for relational data. I’m using it now in SQL Server 2016. We configured a 16-core VM for handling requests on the DB. The recommendation was to separate inbound data packets into related chunks, which were 1/16th of the size.

This way, the import process could make full use of parallelization, and it worked. We imported 20 million rows of sales facts in less than 15 seconds, and the content was query-able immediately. I’ve never seen that before. This was impressive. This meant that we could completely rebuild the data warehouse to “current” from "scratch" within minutes, assuming that the data was in S3 already.

Tables that would typically be 2GB in size are now about 250MB. This means more data in memory. You can also configure the tables to live in the memory of all of the available cores. This is good for small dimension tables. You can also fragment them across all cores, for the larger fact tables. This allows for distributed query processing. Once you set it up, it just worked. It was all specified in the PG-SQL table statements.

There were two data centers in Sydney that were guaranteeing us a distributed solution. We really didn’t notice this. It was more of a check box situation. At one point, there was an outage at AWS, but it didn’t impact our operations directly.

This has given us the ability to provide metrics to the large number of company staff on their performance without impacting core systems.

I’d like to see these RedShift features arrive in other languages, such as SQL's ColumnStore index.

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I have used this solution for three years.

There have been no stability issues.

Technical support always met my expectations.

I was on a team that was using AWS tools for Dick Smith Electronics (now liquidated). The tools ceased use in February of 2016.

Prior to that, we were using them fully for about 3 years. We loaded data to Redshift according to the best practices included in the online docs and through consultation with the AWS staff. The combination of S3 and Redshift for this purpose was very high in performance. Redshift was used to provide the data model to an instance of MicroStrategy for BI reporting.

We were using MicroStrategy, which generated all the SQL that our reporting services needed.

As such, I could only comment on the data engineering phase. Technically, this was so impressive that I don’t know what to add. I don’t recall feeling that it missed anything. If anything, I was not using all the available features. AWS documentation is great in this regard. You can tell they have put a lot of thought into it.

A lot of the future direction in database technology has to do with memory optimization and concurrency (VoltDB). This is more targeted towards transactional processing, and not data warehousing.

Memory-only data warehousing solves a lot of access issues without having to think too hard about the problem from the consumers' point of view. I am sure that you can already configure this.

We primarily use Amazon Redshift for data warehousing.

The user interface of Amazon Redshift is easy to use, even though we do not use it a lot. The stability has been great as I have not experienced any glitches. Scalability is also a strong point; I can scale it however I want without any limitations. However, pricing is a major disadvantage as it is expensive.

Pricing needs improvement as the solution is expensive.

We have been using Amazon Redshift for approximately two years.

Amazon Redshift is stable. I have not experienced or heard about any glitches.

Amazon Redshift is scalable with no limitations that I am aware of.

The pricing of Amazon Redshift is expensive.

I do not want to continue this call. I hope you have gotten input from me. I would rate Amazon Redshift a ten on a scale of one to ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Our company uses AWS. So, it was logical to integrate with other services, too. The solution is easy to set up and use.

I do not like the product. It is difficult to work with unstructured data and JSON documents. It would be great if the solution could handle unstructured data more easily. It will be useful if the tool provides support for vector operations.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years.

The pricing is reasonable. The cost might increase if we process a huge amount of data.

The newer version of Postgres can deal with unstructured data more easily. Amazon Redshift is not able to do it yet. Amazon Redshift is difficult to use comparatively.

We use the serverless version. My recommendation depends on the problem an organization is trying to solve. If a company uses AWS products, introducing another vendor is not reasonable. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

Redshift is a managed service for data warehouses.

I find the most valuable features to be the MPP style of processing, which mostly all of the data warehouses provide. The ability to integrate all other AWS services, such as NSS and S3, with little effort is very helpful. The service is well maintained, there are update patches frequently.

We recently moved from the DC2 cluster to the RA3 cluster, which is a different node type and we are finding some issues with the RA3 cluster regarding connection and processing. There is room for improvement in this area. We are in talks with AWS regarding the connection issues.

In an upcoming release, I would like to have a Snowflake-like feature where we can create another cluster in the same data warehouse, with the same data. You can create a different cluster and compute nodes for each of your use cases, for retail, and for your data analyst all while keeping your underlying data safe.

Additionally, the cluster resize process takes down the cluster for too long, approximately 15 minutes. There are limitations to the size, you can resize only by a multiplier of two, for example, if you have four nodes then you can either go to eight nodes or you can come down to two nodes. There should be fewer limitations.

I have been using Amazon Redshift for approximately one year.

There are three people in my organization using this soltuon.

Their technical support is good. They provide assistance when we need it but since we were experiencing a connection issue it was taking longer to get a resolution. We had to involve a vendor to get it resolved for us.

I have previously used ClickHouse.

The installation was easy.

The price of the solution is reasonable. According to the RA3 cluster particularly, it provides 128 GB of storage with only four nodes. If you can manage your computations processes with the help of materialized views and proper queries. I think the IP clusters are very useful and overall fair for the price.

We have been evaluating Snowflake and are in the POC phase. If it passes our quality tests then we will be moving to it soon.

I rate Amazon Redshift a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

I'm a freelancer/consultant, so I use the solution across a wide variety of contexts. 

The most valuable feature is that the solution is fully embedded in the AWS stack. 

The product is the best database for analytics, BI, and whatever else I encounter. 

The customer support could be more responsive. 

I've used Redshift for seven years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The tool is highly scalable. I'm a freelancer, so I use the solution in different contexts, but the total number of end users is usually between 100 and 200.

I contacted technical support before, and they could be more responsive. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. I rate it five out of five here.

The product is cheap considering what it provides; I rate it five out of five for affordability. 

I rate Amazon Redshift ten out of ten. 

I recommend the solution to anyone in an AWS environment. I see a lot of fuss about Snowflake, and I used both, but I'm not much of an Azure guy. I don't know why the pickup rate for Redshift in NL is so low, but that's more marketing-driven, as Snowflake has very aggressive marketing.

Amazon Redshift is one of the best products I've ever come across. 

We use Microsoft Azure, but one of our clients is on AWS, so we did a POC for Amazon Redshift. Now, it's up to them to make the call on whether to continue with the solution based on pricing and their needs.

Redshift's versioning and data security are the two most critical features. When migrating into the cloud, it's vital to secure the data. The encryption and security are there. 

Redshift's GUI could be more user-friendly. It's easier to perform queries and all that stuff in Azure Synapse Analytics.

I have been working on Amazon Redshift for six months, but I haven't used the solution extensively because we only did a POC for one client.

I think Redshift is stable. There shouldn't be any issues. 

Redshift is serverless, so you can scale it as needed. If the amount of data increases, the nodes will automatically be connected.

We haven't contacted Amazon support yet because we didn't encounter any issues that required support from Amazon, but I imagine it's comparable to the service we get from Microsoft. 

I've worked with a couple of cloud-based database solutions like Amazon Redshift and Azure Synapses,

Setting up Redshift is a little complex and requires some prior knowledge, whereas Azure's GUI is more intuitive and it's easier to navigate the steps.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We are a solution provider and Amazon Redshift is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We are working with a few customers that have it implemented right now.

The feature that we find most useful is the ability to do analytics on the fly. It's the most important because it gives us the ability to provide solutions to multiple customers.

We have had some challenges with respect to considering some of the high-end availability architecture for production. We don't find many issues now, but initially, we had some challenges.

This is an older product, so when it comes to usability, it requires a technical person to work with it. It requires a specialist and a good business case to work on it. It has to be a little more user-friendly than what it is today.

In our experiments, the handling of unstructured data was not very smooth.

We have been using Redshift for the last year and a half.

It is fairly stable and works reasonably well.

We tested the scalability to 10 or 15 terabytes and we didn't have an issue with it. I'm not sure what the limit is.

The technical support is very good and they have helped us to move forward with this product. We also had a lot of good support from the community, as well.

It is not complex for a specialist because it is fairly well documented and systematic.

The specialists required by this product are what you will find in most enterprises. However, in a smaller organization, you might have to engage multiple parties with separate expertise to set it up correctly. For example, you will require somebody with experience in database migration to the cloud.

At the moment, pricing is a little bit on the higher side, although it depends on the size of the company. If it's a fairly large enterprise that has a defined budget then they may not have too much of an issue with the pricing.

We have also tried Cosmos DB and Azure for our customers, but they were not chosen after the PoC. Azure and AWS have different database offerings and we experimented with both, but the customer ended up in production and we stayed with that.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Redshift is to ensure that the requirements include having technical people on board to continuously work on getting the results you want. Because it's not that user-friendly, there is a need for a technical resource in the company.

Also, I would suggest watching out for scalability beyond what we have tested. If there is a need for scaling then it should be tested, although it depends on the use case.

If Redshift had a proper interface then I would score it higher.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

• Easy to build out our snowflake design and load data
• Ability to dynamically increase space requirements
• Good speed
• Extremely reliable

We use Redshift as our primary BI data repository. It provides BI for all four of our product lines, which run on Redshift. It is low cost and highly reliable!

It would be nice if we could turn off an instance. However, it would retain the instance in history, thus allowing us to restart without beginning from scratch.

We have been using this a little over a year.

It is pretty easy to learn and use. If you've worked with SQL before, you won't have any problems. Also, it works very well with Talend, which is our ETL tool.

No issues of stability at this point.

No issues of scalability at this point.

Customer Service:

I don't know that we've ever had to contact AWS for Redshift assistance. Everything is straightforward.

Technical Support:

Not applicable.

This was our first foray into a data warehouse and customer facing BI.

We went into the project with a design in mind and Redshift provided a great working platform. Our ETL tool helped us out in building the metadata and Birst built out many of the necessary tables.

The primary implementation was done in-house, with assistance from Birst during the Birst installation.

The corporate expectation is to break-even after the first year of selling BI to our customer base. We'll know this by end of Q2, 2018. On the positive side, the addition of BI has helped close multiple sales, so we're beating the competitors with our BI tools (running on Redshift).

BI is sold to our customer base as a part of the initial sales bundle. A customer may elect to opt for a white labeled site for an up-charge.

We pretty much went with Redshift, as the company migrated everything to AWS. We might have looked at other database options, but we did not put much time into it.

Plan out your our DB design in advance and test your theories on running a small instance first. Use a good ETL tool, like Talend, so updates can be scheduled easily. Don't try to write these from scratch. Redshift has been a great DB for us to date. We haven't seen any slowdowns or outages!