Getting Started with Amazon Redshift

Start by learning the fundamentals and then progress to creating and managing your own Redshift cluster. This guide walks you step-by-step through the world of big data, cloud computing, and scalable data warehousing.

Overview

• Step-by-step instructions to create and manage your Redshift cluster
• Understand the technology behind the database engine, as you learn about compression, block level storage, and column stores
• Learn the implementation and database design considerations you will need to understand to successfully implement your own Amazon Redshift cluster

In Detail

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service. It provides an excellent approach to analyzing all your data using your existing business intelligence tools.

Getting Started With Amazon Redshift is an easy-to-read, descriptive guide that breaks down the complex topics of data warehousing and Amazon Redshift. You will learn the fundamentals of Redshift technology and how to implement your own Redshift cluster, through practical, real-world examples. This exciting new technology is a powerful tool in your arsenal of data management and this book is a must-have to implement and manage your next enterprise Data Warehouse.

Packed with detailed descriptions, diagrams, and explanations, Getting Started With Amazon Redshift will bring you along, regardless of your current level of understanding, to a point where you will feel comfortable with running your own Redshift cluster. The author's own experiences will give you an understanding of what you will need to consider when working with your own data. You will also learn about how compression has been implemented and what that means relative to a column store database structure. As you progress, you will gain an understanding of monitoring techniques, performance considerations, and what it will take to successfully run your Amazon Redshift cluster on a day-to-day basis. There truly is something in this book for everyone who is interested in learning about this technology.

What you will learn from this book

• Provision your own Redshift cluster
• Connect third party tools and software to your Redshift cluster
• Load data using Redshift's copy tools and manage your data files
• Manage queries through the implementation of Workload Management
• Gain an understanding of the underlying architecture, everything from a detailed view of compression, to column store block-level storage
• Resize your cluster and use Redshift scalability to expand and grow with ease as your data storage needs grow

Approach

Getting Started With Amazon Redshift is a step-by-step, practical guide to the world of Redshift. Learn to load, manage, and query data on Redshift.

Who this book is written for

This book is for CIOs, enterprise architects, developers, and anyone else who needs to get familiar with RedShift. The CIO will gain an understanding of what their technical staff is working on; the technical implementation personnel will get an in-depth view of the technology, and what it will take to implement their own solutions.

Stefan Bauer

Stefan Bauer has worked in business intelligence and data warehousing since the late 1990s on a variety of platforms in a variety of industries. Stefan has worked with most major databases, including Oracle, Informix, SQL Server, and Amazon Redshift as well as other data storage models, such as Hadoop. Stefan provides insight into hardware architecture, database modeling, as well as developing in a variety of ETL and BI tools, including Integration Services, Informatica, Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Pentaho, and others. In addition to traditional development, Stefan enjoys teaching topics on architecture, database administration, and performance tuning. Redshift is a natural extension fit for Stefan's broad understanding of database technologies and how they relate to building enterprise-class data warehouses.