It exposes a Postgres-like interface, but under the hood it’s different in a couple ways:ĭata is stored in columns – Unlike Postgres, Redshift is a column store. Redshift is a cloud-based data warehouse offered by Amazon.

This blog post describes some of our experience with Redshift and its various quirks. We tried a lot of different things to make it stable and scalable, and in doing so we learned a lot about Redshift and how it’s different from Postgres. At first, the sync process we designed was too slow to be viable for large customers. With Heap SQL, we’re syncing large amounts of data across ~80 Redshift clusters on a daily basis. Combined with Heap’s capture-everything philosophy, it enables some powerful flows: customers can define an event in our web UI, and then run arbitrary SQL on all historical instances of that event! Since so many Heap customers use Redshift, we built Heap SQL to allow them to sync their Heap datasets to their own Redshift clusters. Many companies use it, because it has made data warehousing viable for smaller companies with a limited budget. Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse that’s orders of magnitudes cheaper than traditional alternatives.

Redshift distribution keys