Understanding the use cases for Amazon Redshift and data warehousing

A data warehousing solution is a specialized database solution designed to pull data from other relational databases and enable complex querying and analytics to be performed across different datasets. For example, you can combine data across customer orders, inventory data, and financial information to analyze product trends, demands, and return on investments.

Clients of Amazon Redshift include business intelligence (BI) applications, reporting, and analytics toolsets.

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Amazon Redshift is designed for analytics and is optimized for scanning many rows of data for one or multiple columns. Instead of organizing data as rows, Redshift transparently organizes data by columns; it converts the data into columnar storage for each of the columns. Let's look at what this means.

In a traditional database, data for each record is stored as rows. The columns represent the...