Amazon Redshift Cookbook
Recipes for building modern data warehousing solutions
Shruti Worlikar
Thiyagarajan Arumugam
Harshida Patel
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Amazon Redshift Cookbook
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Foreword
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed cloud data warehouse house service that enables you to analyze all your data. Tens of thousands of customers use Amazon Redshift today to analyze exabytes of structured and semi-structured data across their data warehouse, operational databases, and data lake using standard SQL.
Our Analytics Specialist Solutions Architecture team at AWS work closely with customers to help use Amazon Redshift to meet their unique analytics needs. In particular, the authors of this book, Shruti, Thiyagu, and Harshida have worked hands-on with hundreds of customers of all types, from startups to multinational enterprises. They’ve helped projects ranging from migrations from other data warehouses to Amazon Redshift, to delivering new analytics use cases such as building a predictive analytics solution using Redshift ML. They’ve also helped our Amazon Redshift service team to better understand customer needs and prioritize new feature development.
I am super excited that Shruti, Thiyagu, and Harshida have authored this book, based on their deep expertise and knowledge of Amazon Redshift, to help customers quickly perform the most common tasks. This book is designed as a cookbook to provide step-by-step instructions across these different tasks. It has clear instructions on prerequisites and steps required to meet different objectives such as creating an Amazon Redshift cluster, loading data in Amazon Redshift from Amazon S3, or querying data across OLTP sources like Amazon Aurora directly from Amazon Redshift.
I recommend this book to any new or existing Amazon Redshift customer who wants to learn not only what features Amazon Redshift provides, but also how to quickly take advantage of them.
Eugene Kawamoto
Director, Product Management
Amazon Redshift, AWS
Contributors
About the authors
Shruti Worlikar is a cloud professional with technical expertise in data lakes and analytics across cloud platforms. Her background has led her to become an expert in on-premises-to-cloud migrations and building cloud-based scalable analytics applications. Shruti earned her bachelor's degree in electronics and telecommunications from Mumbai University in 2009 and later earned her masters' degree in telecommunications and network management from Syracuse University in 2011. Her work history includes work at J.P. Morgan Chase, MicroStrategy, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). She is currently working in the role of Manager, Analytics Specialist SA at AWS, helping customers to solve real-world analytics business challenges with cloud solutions and working with service teams to deliver real value. Shruti is the DC Chapter Director for the non-profit Women in Big Data (WiBD) and engages with chapter members to build technical and business skills to support their career advancements. Originally from Mumbai, India, Shruti currently resides in Aldie, VA, with her husband and two kids.
Thiyagarajan Arumugam (Thiyagu) is a principal big data solution architect at AWS, architecting and building solutions at scale using big data to enable data-driven decisions. Prior to AWS, Thiyagu as a data engineer built big data solutions at Amazon, operating some of the largest data warehouses and migrating to and managing them. He has worked on automated data pipelines and built data lake-based platforms to manage data at scale for the customers of his data science and business analyst teams. Thiyagu is a certified AWS Solution Architect (Professional), earned his master's degree in mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and is the author of several blog posts at AWS on big data. Thiyagu enjoys everything outdoors – running, cycling, ultimate frisbee – and is currently learning to play the Indian classical drum the mrudangam. Thiyagu currently resides in Austin, TX, with his wife and two kids.
Harshida Patel is a senior analytics specialist solution architect at AWS, enabling customers to build scalable data lake and data warehousing applications using AWS analytical services. She has presented Amazon Redshift deep-dive sessions at re:Invent. Harshida has a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering and a master's in electrical and telecommunication engineering. She has over 15 years of experience architecting and building end-to-end data pipelines in the data management space. In the past, Harshida has worked in the insurance and telecommunication industries. She enjoys traveling and spending quality time with friends and family, and she lives in Virginia with her husband and son.
About the reviewers
Anusha Challa is a senior analytics specialist solution architect at AWS with over 10 years of experience in data warehousing both on-premises and in the cloud. She has worked on multiple large-scale data projects throughout her career at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), EY, and AWS. She has worked with hundreds of Amazon Redshift customers and has built end-to-end scalable, reliable, and robust data pipelines.
Vaidy Krishnan leads business development for AWS, helping customers successfully adopt and be successful with AWS analytics services. Prior to AWS, Vaidy spent close to 15 years building, marketing, and launching analytics products to customers in market-leading companies such as Tableau and GE across industries ranging from healthcare to manufacturing. When not at work, Vaidy likes to travel and golf.