What not to do – anti-patterns for a data warehouse
While there are many good ways to use a data warehouse for analytics, there are some approaches that at first may seem to be a good fit for a data warehouse but are generally not recommended.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways of using a data warehouse that should be avoided.
Using a data warehouse as a transactional datastore
Data warehouses are designed to be optimized for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) queries, so they should not be used for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) queries and use cases.
While there are mechanisms to update or delete data from a data warehouse (such as the merge
statement in Redshift), a data warehouse is primarily designed for mostly append-only, or insert, queries. There are also other features of transactional databases (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) that are available in Redshift – such as the concept of primary and foreign keys – but these are...