What is Amazon Redshift and how can it help you with Data Warehousing?

Introduction

In the present business world, abundant data is being generated within seconds, which is a valuable asset to work with and is stored in multiple sources. Here is the best solution to get all this data stored and organized in the data warehouse. In traditional databases, we store data in small tables which are joined to form another table. The feasible solution to this problem is AWS Redshift. Data Warehouseis more efficient because it can convert the data from multiple sources into a predictable format.

Amazon Redshift
Redshift is a fully managed data warehousing solution provided by AWS. You can start using Redshift with a little amount of data like in GBS to large amounts of data like petabytes and much more than that. This will help you to get meaningful insight from your data. This will deliver higher performance than any other data warehouse and is very easy to use.

The Architecture of Amazon Redshift

Client Applications: In Amazon Redshift, most of the existing SQL client applications can be used with very minimal changes. This can integrate with ETL tools and also business intelligence and analytical tools.

Clusters: The cluster is the main component of the Amazon cluster. A cluster can contain one or more leaders and compute nodes. If there a two or more compute nodes then, an additional leader node will be added to which a client application communicates.

Leader Node: This is the node that communicates with both client applications as well as compute nodes. This produces the execution plan and sends it to the compute nodes along with compile code and also the data to get the results. This node will send the compiled code to execute only when the data present in that node is used otherwise leader node executes the queries by itself.

Compute Nodes: These compute nodes work with the compiled code sent to them by the leader node, they execute the code and send the results back to the leader node to aggregate them. Every compute node has a dedicated CPU, disk space, and memory which differ for the node types. Depending on the workload we can either increase the components of the compute nodes by upgrading the type or by adding new nodes.

Node slices: Node slices are also assigned with some amount of CPU, and disk space which are the portions of compute nodes. The task given to the nodes is divided among these node slices by the leader node to make them work parallelly to obtain the output. The number of node slices depends on the size of the node.

Databases: A cluster contains one or more databases in it. User data is stored in these databases of compute nodes. The client should communicate with the leader node which in turn communicates with the compute nodes to get the data. Amazon Redshift is an RDBMS, it is compatible and has the same functionality as other RDBMS applications.

Conclusion

Amazon Redshift is a scalable and economic data warehousing service offered by AWS. It can be used to integrate with analytical and BI tools. Previously, it was very difficult to manage data from multiple sources and now it has become an easy task with Amazon Redshift. This handles all these tasks just by launching a cluster. Therefore, this is an easy-to-use service.

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