Amazon Redshift conceptual overview
Amazon Redshift Serverless lets you access and analyze data without all of the configurations of a provisioned data warehouse. Resources are automatically provisioned and data warehouse capacity is intelligently scaled to deliver fast performance for even the most demanding and unpredictable workloads. You don't incur charges when the data warehouse is idle, so you only pay for what you use. You can load data and start querying right away in the Amazon Redshift query editor v2 or in your favorite business intelligence (BI) tool. Enjoy the best price performance and familiar SQL features in an easy-to-use, zero administration environment.
If you are a first-time user of Amazon Redshift, we recommend that you begin by reading the following sections:
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Amazon Redshift Serverless feature overview – In this topic, you can find an overview of Amazon Redshift Serverless and its key capabilities.
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Service highlights and pricing
– On this product detail page, you can find details about Amazon Redshift Serverless highlights and pricing. -
Getting started with Amazon Redshift Serverless – In this topic, you can learn more about how to create an Amazon Redshift Serverless data warehouse, and start querying data using query editor v2.
If you prefer to manage your Amazon Redshift resources manually, you can create provisioned clusters for your data querying needs. For more information, see Amazon Redshift clusters.
If your organization is eligible and your cluster is being created in an AWS Region where Amazon Redshift Serverless is unavailable,
you might be able to create a cluster under the Amazon Redshift free trial program.
Choose either
Production or Free trial to
answer the question What are you planning to use this cluster
for?
When you choose Free trial, you create a configuration with the dc2.large node type.
For more information about choosing a free trial, see
Amazon Redshift free trial
The following are some key Amazon Redshift Serverless concepts.
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Namespace – A collection of database objects and users. Namespaces group together all of the resources you use in Amazon Redshift Serverless, such as schemas, tables, users, datashares, and snapshots.
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Workgroup – A collection of compute resources. Workgroups house compute resources that Amazon Redshift Serverless use to run computational tasks. Some examples of such resources include Redshift Processing Units (RPUs), security groups, usage limits. Workgroups have network and security settings that you can configure using the Amazon Redshift Serverless console, the AWS Command Line Interface, or the Amazon Redshift Serverless APIs.
For more information about configuring namespace and workgroup resources, see Working with namespaces and Working with workgroups.
Following are some key Amazon Redshift provisioned clusters concepts:
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Cluster – The core infrastructure component of an Amazon Redshift data warehouse is a cluster.
A cluster is composed of one or more compute nodes. The compute nodes run the compiled code.
If a cluster is provisioned with two or more compute nodes, an additional leader node coordinates the compute nodes. The leader node handles external communication with applications, such as business intelligence tools and query editors. Your client application interacts directly only with the leader node. The compute nodes are transparent to external applications.
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Database – A cluster contains one or more databases.
User data is stored in one or more databases on the compute nodes. Your SQL client communicates with the leader node, which in turn coordinates running queries with the compute nodes. For details about compute nodes and leader nodes, see Data warehouse system architecture. Within a database, user data is organized into one or more schemas.
Amazon Redshift is a relational database management system (RDBMS) and is compatible with other RDBMS applications. It provides the same functionality as a typical RDBMS, including online transaction processing (OLTP) functions such as inserting and deleting data. Amazon Redshift also is optimized for high-performance batch analysis and reporting of datasets.
Following, you can find a description of typical data processing flow in Amazon Redshift, along with descriptions of different parts of the flow. For further information about Amazon Redshift system architecture, see Data warehouse system architecture.
The following diagram illustrates a typical data processing flow in Amazon Redshift.
An Amazon Redshift data warehouse is an enterprise-class relational database query and management system. Amazon Redshift supports client connections with many types of applications, including business intelligence (BI), reporting, data, and analytics tools. When you run analytic queries, you are retrieving, comparing, and evaluating large amounts of data in multiple-stage operations to produce a final result.
At the data ingestion layer, different types of data sources continuously upload structured, semistructured, or unstructured data to the data storage layer. This data storage area serves as a staging area that stores data in different states of consumption readiness. An example of storage might be an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
At the optional data processing layer, the source data goes through preprocessing, validation, and transformation using extract, transform, load (ETL) or extract, load, transform (ELT) pipelines. These raw datasets are then refined by using ETL operations. An example of an ETL engine is AWS Glue.
At the data consumption layer, data is loaded into your Amazon Redshift cluster, where you can run analytical workloads.
For some examples of analytical workloads, see Querying outside data sources.
