Using Geospatial Data with Amazon Redshift

Querying geospatial data in a data warehouse isn’t anything new, but the advantage of doing so in the cloud has opened the door to unparalleled performance and insight. I have heard from numerous customers who said that when they moved from their on-premises data warehouse to Redshift, they not only saved money but were also able to store and analyze more data exponentially. When you combine the cheap and efficient storage of S3 with the power of Redshift, where you can create up to 128 Redshift instances in a cluster, you can unlock powerful analytics. Also, like everything on AWS, you can then turn off those 128 instances after your query has completed and pay next to nothing. In this chapter, we will cover Redshift features as well as offer a demonstration of setting up and running geospatial queries on Redshift.

The chapter covers the following topics:

• What is Redshift?
• Understanding Redshift partitioning
• Redshift...