Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse product which forms part of the larger cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale to a petabyte or more. This enables you to use your data to acquire new insights for your business and customers.

Amazon Redshift is a relational database management system (RDBMS), so it is compatible with other RDBMS applications.

History

Amazon Redshift is totally based on an older version of PostgreSQL 8.0.2, and later Redshift has made changes to that version. An initial beta was released in November 2012 and a complete version available on February 15, 2013. The service can handle connections from most other applications using ODBC and JDBC connections. Amazon Redshift has the largest Cloud data warehouse deployments, with more than 6,500 deployments.

How does Amazon Redshift works?

Redshift configured either as a single Node of 160GB, or it could be multi node clustered solution with a ‘Leader’ node that manages client connections and receives queries, in front of up to 128 Compute Nodes which store the data and perform queries. Redshift uses advanced compression technology that compresses columns by individually in the database to achieve significant compression relative to traditional relational database stores.  By this the data stored in Redshift consumes less storage space compared to competing technologies.

Redshift leverages MPP technology of that the data and query workloads are automatically distributed across all compute nodes, enabling Redshift to resolve complex queries across large datasets quickly and efficiently.