Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift, a hosted data warehouse product, forms part of the larger cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services. It is built on top of technology from the massive parallel processing (MPP) data-warehouse company ParAccel (later acquired by Actian). Redshift differs from Amazon's other hosted database offering, Amazon RDS, in its ability to handle analytics workloads on large-scale datasets stored by a column-oriented DBMS principle. To be able to handle large scale datasets Amazon makes use of massive parallel processing.

Amazon Redshift is based on PostgreSQL 8.0.2. PostgreSQL 9.x includes some features that are not supported in Amazon Redshift. In addition, there are important differences between Amazon Redshift SQL and PostgreSQL 8.0.2.

In fact, PostgreSQL 8.0.2 was released in 2005 and PostgreSQL has seen massive development since then. The list of unsupported PostgreSQL features has become lengthy.

BI tools

In principle Amazon Redshift is able to handle all connections from other applications based upon ODBC and JDBC connections. Amazon has listed a number of business intelligence tools as partners and tested tools.

• Actian
• Actuate Corporation
• Birst
• Chartio
• ClearStory Data
• Dundas Data Visualization
• Infor
• Ideata Analytics
• Jaspersoft
• Jreport
• Keboola
• Logi Analytics
• Looker (Software)
• MicroStrategy
• Pentaho
• Periscope.io
• Qlik
• QuickSight
• Redrock BI
• SAS (software)
• SiSense
• Spotfire
• Tableau Software
• Power BI

Data integration tools

Amazon Redshift also has partners providing data integration tools.

• ironSource.atom
• Alooma
• Attunity
• Etleap
• FlyData
• Informatica
• Matillion
• SnapLogic
• Talend
• Xplenty
• DataStage

History

An initial preview beta was released on November 2012 and a full release was made available on February 15, 2013.