Amazon Redshift

Data Warehouse

• In computing, a data warehouse is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence.
• A data warehouse centralizes and consolidates large amounts of data from multiple source
• The data within a data warehouse is usually derived from a wide range of sources such as application log files and transaction applications.
• It is a relational database that is designed for query and analysis rather than for transaction processing.
  • It usually contains historical data derived from transaction data, but it can include data from other sources.
  • To perform analytics you need a data warehouse not a regular database
• OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing) is characterized by relatively low volume of transactions. Queries are often very complex and involve aggregations.
• RDS (MySQL..etc ) is an OLTP database, where there is detailed and current data, and a schema used to store transactional data

AWS Redshift

• Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service .
• It is optimized for datasets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more
• It costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
• Amazon Redshift gives you fast querying capabilities over structured data using familiar SQL based clients and business intelligence (BI) tools using standard ODBC and JDBC connections.
• Queries are distributed and parallelized across multiple physical resources.
• Amazon Redshift uses replication and continuous backups to enhance availability and improve data durability and can automatically recover from component and node failures
• Redshift is a SQL based data warehouse used for analytics applications (Analytics DB)
  • Example use cases: Sales Reporting, Health Care analytics
  • It is suited for OLAP-based use cases (On Line Analytics Processing)
  • Can store huge amount of data (a database), but can’t ingest huge amounts of data in real time (not like what Kinesis can do)
• You can launch & Configure it from AWS Console or through AWS Redshift APIs
• Redshift can:
  • Fully recover from a node or component failure
  • It automatically patches and performs data backup
  • Backups can be stored for a user defined retention period
  • Is 10 times faster than traditional SQL RDBMS

Availability and Durability

• Redshift automatically replicates all your data within your data warehouse cluster
• Redshift always keeps three copies of your data:
  • The original one
  • A replica on compute nodes (within the cluster)
  • A backup copy on S3
• Cross Region Replication
  • Redshift can asynchronously replicate your snapshots to S3 in another region for DR

Backup Retention

• Automatically patches and backs up (Snapshots) your data warehouse, storing the
  • backups for a user-defined retention period in AWS S3.
  • By default for one day (24 hours) but you can configure it from 0 – 35 days
• Automatic backups are stopped if you choose retention period of 0
  • You have access to these automated snapshots during the retention period
• Manual backups are not deleted automatically, if you do not manually delete them, you will be charged standard S3 storage rates
• AWS Redshift currently supports only one AZ (no Multi-AZ option)
• You can restore from your backup to a new Redshift cluster in the same or a different AZ

Data Security

• Supports encryption of data at rest
• By default, AWS Redshift takes care of encryption key management
• You can choose to manage your own keys through
  • HSM (Hardware Security Modules)
  • AWS KMS (Key Management Service)
• Supports SSL Encryption, in-transit, between client applications and Redshift data warehouse cluster
• You can’t have direct access to your AWS Redshift cluster nodes