Amazon Redshift powers analytic cloud data warehouses worldwide, from startups to some of the largest enterprise data warehouses available today. This practical guide thoroughly examines this managed service and demonstrates how you can use it to extract value from your data immediately, rather than go through the heavy lifting required to run a typical data warehouse.

Analytic specialists Rajesh Francis, Rajiv Gupta, and Milind Oke detail Amazon Redshift's underlying mechanisms and options to help you explore out-of-the box automation. Whether you're a data engineer who wants to learn the art of the possible or a DBA looking to take advantage of machine learning-based auto-tuning, this book helps you get the most value from Amazon Redshift.

By understanding Amazon Redshift features, you'll achieve excellent analytic performance at the best price, with the least effort. This book helps you:

• Build a cloud data strategy around Amazon Redshift as foundational data warehouse
• Get started with Amazon Redshift with simple-to-use data models and design best practices
• Understand how and when to use Redshift Serverless and Redshift provisioned clusters
• Take advantage of auto-tuning options inherent in Amazon Redshift and understand manual tuning options
• Transform your data platform for predictive analytics using Redshift ML and break silos using data sharing
• Learn best practices for security, monitoring, resilience, and disaster recovery
• Leverage Amazon Redshift integration with other AWS services to unlock additional value

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. AWS for Data

Chapter 2. Getting Started with Amazon Redshift

Chapter 3. Setting Up Your Data Models and Ingesting Data

Chapter 4. Data Transformation Strategies

Chapter 5. Scaling and Performance Optimizations

Chapter 6. Amazon Redshift Machine Learning

Chapter 7. Collaboration with Data Sharing

Chapter 8. Securing and Governing Data

Chapter 9. Migrating to Amazon Redshift

Chapter 10. Monitoring and Administration

Welcome to the world of data warehousing and Amazon Redshift! In this book, we embark on an exciting journey that explores the powerful capabilities of Amazon Redshift and its role in modern data warehousing. Whether you are a data professional, architect, IT leader, or simply someone curious about data management and analytics, this book is designed to provide you with comprehensive insights into modern data warehousing patterns using Amazon Redshift.

Data plays a pivotal role in modern business operations, serving as a valuable asset that fuels informed decision making to drive growth. In today’s digital age, businesses generate and collect vast amounts of data from various sources, including customer interactions, market trends, social media, devices, and operational processes. By harnessing and analyzing this data, businesses can gain competitive advantage by identifying patterns and correlations to make data-driven decisions and drive innovation. As the volume, velocity, and variety of data continue to grow exponentially, it has become increasingly crucial for businesses to have efficient and scalable data warehousing solutions that can handle the demands of today’s data-driven world.

Amazon Redshift, a fully managed, cloud-based data warehousing service, has emerged as a leading solution in the industry, empowering organizations to store, analyze, and gain actionable insights from their vast datasets. With its flexible architecture, high-performance processing capabilities, and integration with other Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Redshift provides a platform for building robust and scalable data warehouses.

Amazon Redshift has been at the forefront in the Gartner Database Management System (DBMS) Magic Quadrant, and this book will provide extra insight on how to successfully implement your analytical solutions on this data warehousing service from AWS. Amazon Redshift has evolved from a standalone analytical query engine to an AI-powered data warehouse service leveraging machine learning (ML) at the core of its features like automatic workload management, Autonomics, and CodeWhisperer in Query Editor.

In this book, we delve into the fundamental concepts and principles of data warehousing, covering topics such as data modeling; extract, transform, and load processes; performance optimization; and data governance. We explore the unique features and advantages of Amazon Redshift, guiding you through the process of setting up, configuring, and managing your Redshift clusters. We will also discuss best practices for data loading, schema design, query optimization, and security considerations.

This book is equally apt for personnel completely new to data warehousing or those who are looking to modernize their current on-premise solutions by leveraging the power of the cloud. The chapters have been organized to first introduce the Amazon Redshift service and the focus shifts toward migration in Chapter 9. But we encourage readers interested in migration to Amazon Redshift to review Chapter 9 earlier as they see fit.

We have used our personal experience with Amazon Redshift, along with our interactions with customers using Amazon Redshift, which is a privilege we earn from our day jobs. Also being close to the actual product teams and engineering teams building out this service has assisted us in sharing some interesting pieces throughout the book.

We took almost an entire calendar year to put this book together. AWS is ever evolving its services based on customer feedback, every few months rolling out new features, and we are looking forward to seeing how soon this book gets “outdated,” or should we say, we are rooting for it!

As you progress through each chapter, you will gain a deeper understanding of how to leverage the power of Amazon Redshift to build a modern data warehouse that can handle large volumes of data, support complex analytical queries, and facilitate real-time insights. We provide practical examples, code snippets, and real-world scenarios to help you apply the concepts and techniques to your own data warehousing projects.

It is important to note that this book assumes no prior knowledge of Amazon Redshift or data warehousing concepts. We start with the basics and gradually build upon them, ensuring that readers of all levels can benefit from this comprehensive guide. Whether you are just beginning your data warehousing journey or seeking to enhance your existing knowledge, this book will serve as a valuable resource and reference.

Without further ado, let’s embark on this exciting journey into the world of data warehousing with Amazon Redshift. May this book serve as a trusted companion, equipping you with the knowledge and tools necessary to build scalable, high-performance data warehouses and transform your organization’s data into a strategic asset.

Happy reading, and may your data endeavors be successful!

About the Author

Rajesh Francis is an Analytics Customer Experience Specialist at AWS and is responsible for driving the AWS market and technical strategy for data warehousing and analytics. Rajesh works closely with large strategic customers to help them adopt Analytics services and new features, develop long-term partnerships, and feed customer requirements back to service teams to guide the direction of our product offerings. In his previous roles, Rajesh has experience as a Solutions Architect and a consultant for over 20 years working in a wide range of domains, helping customers gain business insights with AWS Analytics solutions and SAP Analytics.

Rajiv Gupta is an Analytics Specialist who has been working in the Data Warehousing space for 20 years. He has worked with hundreds of companies to help them architect / build / optimize and modernize their data platforms. Most recently, Rajiv has been working as manager of Solution Architects, partnered closely with the Amazon Redshift Service team. Rajiv’s team helps customers migrate their analytics platforms using the latest techniques to ensure scalability, reliability, and efficiency while being secure, easy to operate and cost optimized. Rajiv’s team also captures valuable feedback from customers to know exactly how big & small organizations are using data to help inform and drive the future of the AWS analytics stack.

Milind Oke is an Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect with over two decades of experience architecting and building enterprise grade Data Warehousing solutions and platforms. He holds AWS certifications for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate, AWS Certified Data Analytics Speciality, AWS Certified Security Speciality, and is based out of New York. He has worked directly with numerous companies in the financial services sector to design the architecture, deliver the build and modernize their data platforms. At Amazon Web Services, he has engaged with hundreds of customers to develop cloud native analytical capabilities or migrate their existing workloads to leverage the scalability, reliability, and agility of the cloud while being secure and cost efficient. While working with customers directly he also liaises closely with the Database Engineering and Product Management teams to help drive the direction of Amazon Redshift.