Connecting Redshift to other AWS services
One of the main benefits a data warehouse offers is that it provides a single location for all the data required for reporting and analytics. Your users don't need to go to multiple different places for the information as it's all in one place. AWS offers several methods that allow you to load data from other sources quickly and efficiently. First, let's look at Redshift Spectrum, which offers connectivity from an S3 bucket.
Redshift Spectrum
Redshift Spectrum is a feature that allows you to query data from an S3 bucket directly from Redshift using a SQL query. Before Spectrum was released, you would have had to load the data from S3 into Redshift before it could be queried, but now, you can query it in situ. To use Redshift Spectrum, you must configure your S3 bucket as an external table that you can then call in a query. You can even use joins to create a complex query involving multiple S3 buckets and files, as well...