All 7 Amazon Redshift & Data Warehousing questions
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AWS › Amazon Redshift & Data Warehousing

What is Amazon Redshift and how is it different from a typical relational database like RDS?

Beginner

Answer

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte scale data warehouse service optimized for running complex analytical queries across massive datasets, using a columnar storage format and massively parallel processing, unlike RDS which is optimized for transactional workloads such as handling many small, fast reads and writes for an application's day to day operations.
aws redshift create-cluster --cluster-identifier my-cluster --node-type dc2.large --number-of-nodes 2 --master-username admin --master-user-password MyPassword123
Real-world example A company runs its everyday application on RDS for fast transactional operations like processing customer orders, while periodically loading that same data into Redshift to run large analytical reports summarizing sales trends across millions of historical records.

Common follow-ups: What is the difference between an OLTP and an OLAP workload?;Can Redshift and RDS share the exact same underlying data automatically?

RDS & Databases;Amazon Athena
All 7 Amazon Redshift & Data Warehousing questions