Amazon Redshift Reviews

If you want to create an enterprise data hub, that is where Redshift is used. Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, and Azure Synapse are enterprise data warehousing and cloud data technologies. Large enterprises have enterprise data. They have a lot of managed processes, business processes, customers, products, different assets, locations, equipment, etc. Then they have sales and marketing. There's a huge amount of data that is generated, and they will need a large warehouse or multiple data warehouses to create analytics out of that data.

We try to tell organizations to consolidate all their data into a single unified data platform that has all the enterprise data rather than being processed by multiple warehouses. It's processed on one central data platform, which is cloud-based. In which case, we recommend one of these four. We either recommend Snowflake, Azure Synapse, AWS Redshift, or Google BigQuery. It depends on what their early investment is and what kind of work they need to do.

Redshift is completely Managed on AWS cloud.

I would like to see improvement in the pricing and the simplicity of using this solution.

The product is very stable, and so are all other cloud-based managed Enterprise data platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery and Azure Synapse)

It's scalable as it's on hosted and Managed on AWS cloud.

Technical support is great, very professional.

Neutral

I would recommend Snowflake the highest, then Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, and then Redshift.

If somebody is heavily invested into Microsoft, then going for Azure Synapse is what we recommend. If they're open to moving to a completely new system, we evaluate the landscape and we recommend either Snowflake or Google BigQuery. What we recommend and what we design and create and implement for our different enterprise customers is very different for each customer. There's no One-size-fits-all solution.

For example, for one of our customers, we have helped design and create their entire single unified data platform using Snowflake.

I would say Redshift needs a little more effort and expertise for setting up the kind of infrastructure one need. If you can do something with two-three people for Snowflake, you would need four people on Redshift. You need to have a little bit of knowledge of the AWS Cloud and AWS services to be able to use Redshift. A typical Redshift based Enterprise data work would need anywhere between 4 to 15 people.

The return on investment of moving from an on-premise to a completely cloud-hosted data platform is significantly high and worth the effort.

Redshift is costly compared to other solutions.

It's pay per use. You can have multiple models. You can go for yearly cost, which is a little discounted than the monthly cost. Depending on how much data you process and store, you can have different pricing. There's no fixed cost. All of these are based on how much data you store monthly and how much data you process.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10. 

If an organization has invested heavily in AWS services and they have a good knowledge of the AWS ecosystem, then I would recommend Redshift. Otherwise, I would still recommend Snowflake because Snowflake works very well with AWS services. I can have my AWS S3 buckets in which I can store my enterprise data lake, and then Snowflake works with that seamlessly. If the organization has good knowledge of AWS and good knowledge of RDBMS data warehouses, then we can recommend Redshift to them.

It all depends on how much investment that organization has done in Redshift. For example, we have a customer which has a very large setup. It's a large US-based company, where they have invested heavily in AWS. They're an AWS house, so they like everything about AWS. For them, we have recommended Redshift so that the overall tech ecosystem remains optimum. 

We use Amazon Redshift in our business intelligence ecosystem. It's simple to configure, cost-effective, and close to our data sources.

The managed service is scalable and reliable. AWS takes away scalability and reliability components, making it relatively easier for us.

Its simplicity in configuration, cost-effectiveness due to being in the cloud and close to our data sources, and the fact that it's a managed service that is scalable and reliable are highly valuable.

There are no significant issues preventing us from doing our tasks. However, there might be some limitations from a business intelligence perspective, but nothing we can't find a workaround for.

We have been using it for five years or more.

We are happy with it, so there are no major stability issues that stand out.

AWS handles scalability and reliability, making it easier for us to manage.

We have two people to continue with support.

Positive

Setting it up was straightforward due to its simplicity and being a managed service.

AWS handles the scalability and reliability components, making it easier to implement.

Ensure that information about specific configurations and internal uses remains anonymous.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The solution can be used as a warehouse. We dump any data that exists in our company into it. We spring up different databases based on the requirements.

The tool is the one place where the company’s data is stored. We use it extensively. Previously, we had data in multiple databases and structures. Since we started using Redshift, everything is in one place. We have multiple supporting layers and dashboards connected directly to Redshift. It helps and supports all the different businesses.

It is very easy to dump data into the tool. We do not worry about partitions. It has auto-vacuum features. We need not worry about I/O speed. It is easy to integrate the solution with other AWS services like Blu and Pacemaker.

Sometimes, it's difficult to get the metadata from Redshift. The product has too many layers to get simple information. Redshift does not have primary-key tools. The vendor must consider adding them.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The stability depends on the number of clusters and the query performance. If the cluster is scaled enough, Redshift queries are pretty quick. I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten.

We have multiple issues with the product’s scalability. The AWS team has helped us scale to the correct amount. We do not use Auto Scaling. We use AWS experts to help us scale based on our needs.

The setup is pretty easy. I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten.

I will recommend the solution to others. It is pretty easy to use. If we're using AWS, it is easy to use other AWS features. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The solution is used to handle unstructured data.

We have been using the product for some time. We are exploring and learning from the new offering of the product.

AWS provides an ecosystem of different offerings. The product offers good support for the data lake. It also provides a lambda function for automating flows.

The initial deployment was complex.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half.

We have an SLA of 99.99%. The product is available most of the time. The vendor maintains the SLA well. They also have a scheduled maintenance window.

The tool’s scalability is pretty good. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial support for moving to a serverless database was very good. AWS provides good support. The technical support is not consistent, though.

We need a solution architect from AWS to help us with deployment.

Initially, we saw a return on investment. Now, the cost is going up according to our use cases. We need to optimize the cost.

The cost must be improved. We’re concerned about the cost. It’s driving a lot of TCO for us. We are looking for alternatives to optimize the cost.

Nutanix also provides similar products. It also offers different options for cloud providers.

It’s a pretty good solution. We plan small and grow big over time. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We stored all of the data in the S3 bucket and would like to have it stored in a data warehouse, which is why we chose this database. 

It would be very easy for us as an end-user, who would like to access the data, rather than draw it post-transformation and store it at a database level.

The TP transactions for the creation of the tables does very well.

It is quite simple to use and there are no issues with creating the tables.

The managing updates, deletes, and role-level change performance is very low. For example, while you are doing inserts, updates, deletes, and amalgamates, the performance is very, very poor.

If you want to query the database after you have a lot of terabytes of data, the load, performance-wise, is very low.

Looking at the performance of the query, querying the database, and especially with the amalgamates when it is getting updated, it is really poor.

We like this solution and have tried all of the native services; they were working quite well. The only concern about Redshift was managing the cluster, especially the EMR cluster. Our company policy was not to use EMR clusters, especially with the nodes failing. There were many instances of downtime happening. Essentially, there was too much data traffic.

The other drawback was the CDC, as we do not have any tools that can support it.

Creating the structure is easy on the DDL side, but after you create the table and you want to transform the data to store it in a database, the performance is poor.

It takes a lot of time to ingest and update the data. After you ingest the data and someone wants to fetch it in the table, it takes a lot of time performance-wise to return the results.

We have been using this solution for three months.

We are using the latest version.

There are issues with stability and it should be compared with Snowflake.

This solution is scalable. We scale up and scale down manually when we are required to, we do not have an automatic setup.

We have three or four people using this solution.

We have contacted technical support to give our opinion and recommendations or feedback and they agreed that it needs improvement.

Previously, we tried the Snowflake database, which works really well. The expectations were really good with the performance, also the DDL, DML operations on the processing of the data.

The initial setup is simple and we did not find it very complex at all.

The time it takes to deploy depends on how many tables you want to create, or how many tables will you merge the data with.

We are switching to Azure, although not because of the product or the services that we did not like. It's about AWS being competitors for logistic companies that we are working with. Also for security reasons, we do not know how secure the data is on the cloud.

If you are competitors then you don't know if the data can be accessed by your competitor, and the team can be looking at a demographic, which could impact your sales.

We have only just started using Redshift, but we are not really satisfied with it.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

Columnar storage technology is the most valuable feature of this solution.

We can get the SLS/SLAs in our daily processes.

Some improvements can be brought about in:

Restore table:

I would like to use this option to move data across different clusters. Right now, you can only restore a table from the same cluster.

Right now, the feature only permits bringing the table back in the same cluster, based on the snapshot taken. I would like to have a similar option to move data across different clusters, right now I have to UNLOAD from cluster A and then COPY in cluster B. I would like to use the snapshots taken to bring the data in the cluster I need.
Maybe current design cannot be used, because it is based on nodes and data distribution.

But, our real scenario is: if we lose the data and we need to recover it in other cluster, we have to do:

1) Restore table in current table with a different name

2) Unload data to s3

3) Copy data to a new cluster. When we are talking about billions of records is complex to do.

Vacuum process: The vacuum needs to be segmented. For example, after 24 hours of execution, I had to cancel the process and 0% was sorted (big table).

Vacuum process:

The vacuum needs to be segmented, example after 24 hr of execution, I had to cancel the process and 0 % was sorted (big table)"

For big tables (billions of records). if the table is 100% unsorted, the vacuum can take more than 24hrs. If we don't have this timeframe, we have to work around taking out the data to additional tables and run vacuum by batches in the main table.

Why, because If I run the vacuum directly over the main table, and I stop it after 5 hrs, 0 records will be sorted. I would like to run the vacuum over the main table, stop when I need but get vacuumed some records. Like incremental process.

I have used this solution for around three years.

We did encounter stability issues, i.e., if you are using more than 25 nodes (ds2.xlarge), the cluster is totally unstable.

I have not experienced any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support a 9/10 for normal issues.

However, for advanced issues, I would give it a 5/10 since I had to go directly with the AWS engineers support.

Initially, we were using the Microsoft SQL solution. We decided to move over to this product due to the DWH volume and performance.

In my opinion, the setup was normal.

Based on quality of the product and its price, it is the one of the best options available in the market now.

We also looked at the Oracle solution.

You need to make sure that the space used in DWH has to be a maximum of 50% of the total space.

You must create processes to vacuum and analyze tables frequently. Also, before creating the tables, you should choose the right encoding, DISTKEY and sort keys.

I mostly use Amazon Redshift for data warehouse purposes. I have used it as the BI tool source and for making data transformations and keeping them stored permanently. These have been one of the primary use cases most of the time.

Amazon Redshift responds quite fast when you properly configure the cluster and the data schemas and table structures, which is very valuable.

With Amazon Redshift, the time to process a huge amount of data is very fast when you properly configure the cluster, data schemas, and table structures. The solution's speed, stability, and user concurrency have been very good.

Actually, there have been many improvements with the query editor (version two) and the serverless type of cloud cluster, which is great. The only minor issue I faced was that it took a bit longer than expected to change the cluster to have more space or storage. Otherwise, everything is great.

I have been using Amazon Redshift since 2016. Although it has not been constant in all the projects, the first time I used it was in 2016.

I have never had any issues with the stability of Amazon Redshift. It has been very, very stable.

You can configure and scale it up when necessary. However, when I had to do it, it took a bit longer than expected. Overall, I would rate the scalability of Amazon Redshift a nine out of ten.

You can have the wizard, and you can start creating the cluster. You will have it running in minutes. From that point, you can start plugging into it and serving it as a source for the BI tool.

You can start small with a basic cluster to learn and practice with it. Selecting the most basic and economical cluster type can save you enough money to move forward with the solution or go with a solution in distribution for deployment.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I used it as part of the Amazon Connect integration; I had to implement Redshift for a couple of customers. It's used for various use cases involving reporting and exporting data to external sources. I have also used it for some analytics integrations.

The use cases I have typically worked on involve transferring Amazon Connect data to different systems for analytics. The two or three deployments I have done with Redshift are more or less similar because it acts as a kind of data middleware. 

Redshift effectively gathers data from various sources and facilitates the integration of that data into different destinations. This is typically used for insights collection, data showcasing, and integration into a standard ETL process.

So, the overall performance and speed of Redshift have affected the query times.

For the use cases I worked on, particularly on the Connect side, the query times with Redshift are pretty straightforward. We started using Redshift for these cases, and it significantly helped. To achieve faster results from Redshift, we first need to optimize the queries. It does reduce a lot of time in how data is gathered and then presented from the queries.

For me, the most valuable feature of Redshift is the way it operates as a reliable Amazon service. It has the capability to gather data from various Amazon sources and can be easily integrated with some maintenance configuration and code; Lambda functions are required for this. It can be used in multiple places. 

It all depends on the use cases, how we can actually ship the data, and how we can use the data from multiple sources. It is a typical reliable software and works very efficiently with Amazon.

For Amazon Connect combined with Redshift, the integration is mostly straightforward. Using Redshift always depends on the use cases, as there are other methods Amazon Connect can use to achieve its goals. As for Redshift itself, it can be used to build pipelines.

When working with third-party services requires additional integrations and configurations, which can sometimes add more cost.

From the Amazon Connect side of things, we have integrated Redshift. However, as an overall product, I have limited experience. 

But from what I have experienced, whenever we do a Redshift integration, it needs to be planned carefully because although Amazon supports multiple data sources and different data consumption, Redshift needs to be configured very effectively and requires dedicated shared knowledge for successful deployments. 

Redshift is a major service of Amazon and is very scalable. It enables faster recalculations and data management, helping to retrieve data quickly. It’s a relatively old service within Amazon's offerings, with at least 10,000 customers. I've seen cases in different organizations where users experienced up to 35X times increase in throughput while using Amazon Redshift.

It's pretty much straightforward. I just need some sort of configuration and a bit of integration, and then that's it. We should be able to get that done.

For first-time usage of Redshift, the process is pretty straightforward, thanks to the documentation provided by AWS and the straightforward integration with Amazon Connect. 

It didn't take me much time to create, deploy, and configure. It’s very straightforward. However, having some prior knowledge about Redshift can speed up the process significantly. 

For me, coming from a different background and learning about Redshift for the first time, I ended up reading some database documentation and doing some trials and testing before committing the production data.

For someone who knows a bit about how databases and data warehousing work, it's quite straightforward to learn Redshift. It's easier for those involved in analysis, reporting, and ETL data warehousing, specifically database developers or data warehousing developers; they can learn it faster. 

However, for someone without this background, it might take a bit more time to understand the concepts and how they integrate in different ways.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten because it has been straightforward for my use cases. It's easy to integrate for those use cases.