What is Amazon Redshift used for?

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed cloud data warehouse from AWS for running SQL analytics over large datasets drawn from many sources. It is a good fit for business intelligence reporting on AWS, centralizing data from multiple sources and large-scale ad-hoc SQL analysis.

How much does Amazon Redshift cost?

Amazon Redshift is a paid product with no free plan. Pay-as-you-go. Serverless examples use $0.375 per RPU-hour, a provisioned ra3.4xlarge node is $3.26 per hour, and Spectrum scans cost $5 per TB.

Is Amazon Redshift open source?

No. Amazon Redshift is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon Redshift include ClickHouse, Databend and Apache Cloudberry.

What are some alternatives to Amazon Redshift?

Amazon Redshift competes with Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Databricks. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon Redshift alternatives.

Amazon Redshift: features, pricing and alternatives

About Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a managed cloud data warehouse offered by Amazon Web Services. It lets analysts and data engineers load data from many sources and query it with standard SQL, without having to provision, patch or maintain the underlying database servers themselves.

Redshift stores data in a columnar format and spreads queries across multiple nodes, which suits large analytical workloads such as reporting, dashboards and ad-hoc analysis. It connects to other AWS services, for example Amazon S3 for data lake storage, and works with common BI tools through JDBC and ODBC drivers. It can be run as provisioned clusters or as a serverless option.

Redshift is a proprietary, cloud-only AWS service, so it cannot be self-hosted. It fits teams that already build on AWS and want warehouse data close to their other services, security controls and billing.

Key features

SQL queries over large analytical datasets
Columnar storage with parallel query execution
Provisioned clusters and a serverless option
Integration with Amazon S3 data lakes
JDBC and ODBC connectivity for BI tools
Fully managed infrastructure and maintenance

Good fit for

→Business intelligence reporting on AWS
→Centralizing data from multiple sources
→Large-scale ad-hoc SQL analysis

Tags: data-warehouse; sql; analytics; aws; olap; cloud-database; columnar

Amazon Redshift: questions and answers

What is Amazon Redshift used for?: Amazon Redshift is a fully managed cloud data warehouse from AWS for running SQL analytics over large datasets drawn from many sources. It is a good fit for business intelligence reporting on AWS, centralizing data from multiple sources and large-scale ad-hoc SQL analysis.
How much does Amazon Redshift cost?: Amazon Redshift is a paid product with no free plan. Pay-as-you-go. Serverless examples use $0.375 per RPU-hour, a provisioned ra3.4xlarge node is $3.26 per hour, and Spectrum scans cost $5 per TB.
Is Amazon Redshift open source?: No. Amazon Redshift is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon Redshift include ClickHouse, Databend and Apache Cloudberry.
What are some alternatives to Amazon Redshift?: Amazon Redshift competes with Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Databricks. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon Redshift alternatives.