January 31, 2024 | By Zoey Zelmore
Businesses today are generating vast amounts of data every hour, and harnessing this information strategically is crucial for making informed decisions. Data warehousing plays a pivotal role in this process, providing a centralized repository for organizing, storing, and analyzing data. With a plethora of tools available, it can be difficult to determine which solution is best for you.
When evaluating solutions, there are 6 important factors to consider:
- Data types: what type of data are you planning to store?
- Scale: how much data and flexibility are needed?
- Performance: how quickly do you need to query data?
- Maintenance: how much engineering effort can you allocate to warehousing?
- Budget: how much are you willing to spend on warehousing?
- Community: how much integration with other crucial tools are you needing for business functions?
After evaluating your needs based on these questions, a multitude of solutions are available. However, in most cases Amazon Redshift stands out as a powerful and versatile data warehousing solution.
Amazon Redshift Overview
At its core, Redshift is a cloud-based, fully managed data warehouse service with petabyte-scale capacity. What sets it apart is its versatility and its ability to efficiently process and host massive amounts of data, thanks to its columnar design. Amazon Redshift Serverless lets you access and analyze data without the usual configurations of a provisioned data warehouse. Using SQL to make data more accessible, organizations also value the following benefits of Redshift
- Provide workload management
- Automated table design to monitor user workloads
- Improved speeds and layouts
- Queries with your existing tools, increasing flexibility
- Simple API integration across applications
- Fault tolerance
- Performance at any scale
- Secure and compliant
Like most AWS offerings, Redshift is also built on the pay-as-you-go model. With options that fit unique business needs, organizations can choose from the following:
| Redshift Offering | Overview |
| Node Types (RA3 or DC2) | Pay for capacity by the hour with on demand pricing and access to the pause/resume feature or utilize reserved instances to receive discounting on steady workloads |
| Spectrum Pricing | Run queries in your S3 data lake and only pay per the bytes scanned |
| Concurrency Scaling Pricing | Each cluster earns up to 1 hour of credits per day (sufficient for 97% of customers) and pay a per second on demand rate when exceeding daily credits |
| Redshift Managed Storage Pricing (RMS) | Independent of the number of compute nodes provisioned, you pay hourly for the total amount of data in managed storage
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| Redshift ML (Machine Learning) | Utilizes SQL to create, train, and deploy machine learning. Once the free tier for Amazon Sagemaker is exhausted, you begin paying for your model and storage. |
Amazon Redshift Success Story with Opti9
Founded in 1994, a group of Nebraska doctors created SecureCare as the standard for conservative care network management services. One of SecureCare’s main goals is to create a streamlined, cost effective, and accessible network while eliminating the interferences of prior authorization. As their operations expanded, challenges in data organization and computational speed impeded their ability to meet deadlines and keep pace with patient demand. By engaging Opti9, SecureCare has now shifted to an entirely serverless model. Through leveraging Amazon Redshift to develop their own in-house BI tool, SecureCare has improved the speed in which they can ingest, analyze, and report on their data, providing real time insights and generating billing statements and provider/patient report cards. Want to read SecureCare’s full case study? Check it out here!
