Storing columnar data on Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is not used for real-time transactions, but it is used for data warehouse purposes. It is designed to support huge volumes of data at a petabyte scale. It is a column-based database used for analytics, long-term processing, tending, and aggregation. Redshift Spectrum can be used to query data on S3 without loading data to the Redshift cluster (a Redshift cluster is required, though). It’s not an OLTP, but an OLAP. AWS QuickSight can be integrated with Redshift for visualization, with a SQL-like interface that allows you to connect using JDBC/ODBC connections to query the data.

Redshift uses a clustered architecture in one AZ in a VPC with faster network connectivity between the nodes. It is not high availability by design as it is tightly coupled to the AZ. A Redshift cluster has a leader node, and this node is responsible for all the communication between the client and the computing nodes of the cluster, query planning...