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The Redshift Performance
The article captures the key design strategies and components responsible for high-end performance of AWS Redshift
Overview
AWS Redshift is one of the leading cloud based data warehouse system. It promises to deliver 3X (times) higher performance than any of its peers i.e any other cloud based data warehouses. So whats the secret recipe?
In this article, I am going to highlight and discuss the key strategies and components which help in achieving the high performance for Redshift.
Core Design
Redshift stores the data in columnar format which provides the option to optimize the performance from multiple aspects.
Columnar format suggests to keep the column specific data together, rather than the row entries. Because the same type of data is written, it can be compressed in an optimal manner. This reduces the size and the span time both.
Redshift also uses Zone Maps which provide additional information on the column data like minimum and maximum values, in a single or set of data blocks for the same column. The additional metadata enables the database to skip the data blocks that cannot satisfy the conditions for a column value. This again makes the data scan…
