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Amazon RDS vs Amazon Redshift: What are the differences?
Amazon RDS: Set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your Database Instance (DB Instance) via a single API call; Amazon Redshift: Fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service. Redshift makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. It is optimized for datasets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
Amazon RDS can be classified as a tool in the "SQL Database as a Service" category, while Amazon Redshift is grouped under "Big Data as a Service".
Some of the features offered by Amazon RDS are:
- Pre-configured Parameters
- Monitoring and Metrics
- Automatic Software Patching
On the other hand, Amazon Redshift provides the following key features:
- Optimized for Data Warehousing- It uses columnar storage, data compression, and zone maps to reduce the amount of IO needed to perform queries. Redshift has a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, parallelizing and distributing SQL operations to take advantage of all available resources.
- Scalable- With a few clicks of the AWS Management Console or a simple API call, you can easily scale the number of nodes in your data warehouse up or down as your performance or capacity needs change.
- No Up-Front Costs- You pay only for the resources you provision. You can choose On-Demand pricing with no up-front costs or long-term commitments, or obtain significantly discounted rates with Reserved Instance pricing.
"Reliable failovers" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon RDS over the competitors, whereas "Data Warehousing" was stated as the key factor in picking Amazon Redshift.
Airbnb, Netflix, and Coursera are some of the popular companies that use Amazon RDS, whereas Amazon Redshift is used by Lyft, Coursera, and 9GAG. Amazon RDS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1437 company stacks & 526 developers stacks; compared to Amazon Redshift, which is listed in 270 company stacks and 68 developer stacks.
We need to perform ETL from several databases into a data warehouse or data lake. We want to
- keep raw and transformed data available to users to draft their own queries efficiently
- give users the ability to give custom permissions and SSO
- move between open-source on-premises development and cloud-based production environments
We want to use inexpensive Amazon EC2 instances only on medium-sized data set 16GB to 32GB feeding into Tableau Server or PowerBI for reporting and data analysis purposes.
You could also use AWS Lambda and use Cloudwatch event schedule if you know when the function should be triggered. The benefit is that you could use any language and use the respective database client.
But if you orchestrate ETLs then it makes sense to use Apache Airflow. This requires Python knowledge.
AirflowThough we have always built something custom, Apache airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) stood out as a key contender/alternative when it comes to open sources. On the commercial offering, Amazon Redshift combined with Amazon Kinesis (for complex manipulations) is great for BI, though Redshift as such is expensive.
You may want to look into a Data Virtualization product called Conduit. It connects to disparate data sources in AWS, on prem, Azure, GCP, and exposes them as a single unified Spark SQL view to PowerBI (direct query) or Tableau. Allows auto query and caching policies to enhance query speeds and experience. Has a GPU query engine and optimized Spark for fallback. Can be deployed on your AWS VM or on prem, scales up and out. Sounds like the ideal solution to your needs.
Pros of Amazon RDS
- Reliable failovers164
- Automated backups155
- Backed by amazon130
- Db snapshots92
- Multi-availability87
- Control iops, fast restore to point of time30
- Security28
- Elastic24
- Push-button scaling20
- Automatic software patching20
- Replication4
- Reliable3
- Isolation2
Pros of Amazon Redshift
- Data Warehousing37
- Scalable27
- SQL17
- Backed by Amazon14
- Encryption5
- Cheap and reliable1
- Isolation1
- Best Cloud DW Performance1
- Fast columnar storage1
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What is Amazon RDS?
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