Amazon Redshift’s Top Performance Features and Latest Capabilities

Discover Redshift’s top performance features and latest capabilities to streamline your data analysis processes

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Announced in November 2012, Amazon Redshift, according to AWS, is a fully managed cloud data warehouse service designed to quickly and cost-effectively analyze large datasets using existing SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications. With optimized performance for datasets ranging from hundreds of gigabytes to petabyte-scale, Redshift offers fast query speeds regardless of data size.

By leveraging Amazon Redshift’s advanced performance features and latest capabilities, users can boost their cluster’s performance, streamline administrative tasks, and reduce cloud expenses. In this post, we’ll highlight some of Redshift’s key performance features and recently added capabilities, each with links to resources where you can learn more.

Performance Features

Amazon Redshift boasts a variety of performance features, including the following:

1. Massively Parallel Processing (MPP): MPP can distribute queries across multiple nodes and perform queries in parallel for faster processing. Multiple compute nodes handle all query processing leading up to the final result aggregation, with each node’s core running the same compiled query segments on portions of the entire data.
2. Columnar Storage: Redshift stores data in a columnar format, which allows for efficient compression and faster queries on large datasets. Columnar storage for database tables drastically reduces the overall disk I/O requirements and is essential in optimizing analytical query performance.
3. Automatic Compression: Based on their evaluation, Redshift users can manually apply compression encodings to table columns. Alternatively, users can let Redshift analyze and apply compression automatically based on sample data. Redshift automatically compresses data as it is loaded into the database, which reduces storage requirements and improves query performance. Automatic compression balances overall performance when choosing a compression encoding. Auto encoding (ENCODE AUTO) is the default for tables.