What is Amazon Redshift?

Organizations churn out vast troves of customer data along with insights into these customers’ interactions with the business. This data gets funneled into various applications and stashed away in disconnected systems. A conundrum arises when attempting to decipher these data silos – a formidable challenge that hampers the derivation of meaningful insights essential for organizational clarity. Adding to this complexity, security and performance considerations typically muzzle business analysts from accessing data within OLTP systems.

The hiccup is that intricate analytical queries weigh down OLTP databases, casting a shadow over their core operations. Here, the solution is the data warehouse, which is a central hub of curated data, used by business analysts and data scientists to make informed decisions by employing the business intelligence and machine learning tools at their disposal. These users make use of Structured Query Language (SQL) to derive insights from this data trove. From operational systems, application logs, and social media streams to the influx of IoT device-generated data, customers channel structured and semi-structured data into organizations’ data warehouses, as depicted in Figure 1.1, showcasing the classic architecture of a conventional data warehouse.

Figure 1.1 – Data warehouse

Here’s where Amazon Redshift Serverless comes in. It’s a key option within Amazon Redshift, a well-managed cloud data warehouse offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). With cloud-based ease, Amazon Redshift Serverless lets you set up your data storage without infrastructure hassles or cost worries. You pay based on what you use for compute and storage.

Amazon Redshift Serverless goes beyond convenience, propelling modern data applications that seamlessly connect to the data lake. Enter the data lake – a structure that gathers all data strands under one roof, providing limitless space to store data at any scale, cost-effectively. Alongside other data repositories such as data warehouses, data lakes redefine how organizations handle data. And this is where it all comes together – the following diagram shows how Amazon Redshift Serverless injects SQL-powered queries into the data lake, driving a dynamic data flow:

Figure 1.2 – Data lake and data warehouse

So, let’s get started on creating our first data warehouse in the cloud!