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Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.  Customer can startsmall for just $0.25 per hour with no commitments or upfront costs and scale to a petabyte or more for $1000/terabyte per year, less than 1/10 most other data warehousing solutions.

Data Warehousing databases use different type of architecture both from a database perspective and infrastructure layer.

Redshift Configuration

• Start with a single node with up to 160GB data on that node.
• Scale to Multi-Node
  • Leader Node (Managed client connections and receives queries)
  • Compute Node (store data and perform queries and computations)
    • Up to 128 compute nodes.

10X Faster!

Columnar Data Storage

Instead of storing data as a seris of rows, Redshift organizes the data by column.  Unlike row-based systems, which are ideal for transaction processing, column-based systems are ideal for data warehousing and analytics, where queries often  involve aggregates performed over large data sets.  Since only the columns involved in the queries are processed and columnar data is stored sequentially on the storage media, column-based systems require far fewer I/Os, greatly improving query performance.

Advanced Compression

Columnar data stores can be compressed much more than row-based data stores because similar data is stored sequentially on the disk.  Redshift employs multiple compression techniques and can often achieve significant compression relative to traditional relational data stores.  In addition, Redshift doesn’t require indexes or materialized views and so uses less space than traditional relational database systems.  When loading data into an empty table, Redshift automatically samples your data and selects the most appropriate compression scheme.

Massively Parallel Processing (MPP)

Redshift automatically distributes data and query load across all notes.  Redshift makes it easy to add nodes to your data warehouse and enables you to maintain fast query performance as your data warehouse grows.

Pricing

• Compute Node Hours: (Total number of hours you run across all your compute nodes for the billing period.  You are billed for 1 unit per node per hour, so a 3-node data warehouse cluster running persistently for an entire month would incur 2160 instances hours.  You will not be charged for leader node hours – only compute nodes will incur charges.)
• Backup
• Data transfer (Only within a VPC, not outside it.)

Security

• Encrypted in transit using SSL
• Encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption
• By default, RedShift takes care of key management.
  • Managed your own keys through HSM (Hardware Security Modules)
  • AWS Key Management Service

Availability

• Currently only available in 1 AZ
  • Not designed for production, so should not be the end of the world if this is not available all the time.)
• Can restore snapshots to new AZ’s in the event of an outage.

Exam Tips

• Redshift is a Database warehousing service, used primarily for running reports.
• Extreme speed due to:
  • Columnar Data structure
  • Data stored sequentially