The extension of AWS’ Redshift managed data warehousing service that enables querying on data that sits inside of the longstanding AWS S3 storage service.
The introduction of Redshift Spectrum will make certain types of queries on data more economical, because Redshift, which includes computing and storage capabilities, is a more complex and costly service especially for number crunching on lots of data.
“When you issue a query, Redshift rips it apart and generates a query plan that minimizes the amount of S3 data that will be read, taking advantage of both column-oriented formats and data that is partitioned by date or another key,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. “Then Redshift requests Spectrum workers from a large, shared pool and directs them to project, filter, and aggregate the S3 data. The final processing is performed within the Redshift cluster and the results are returned to you.”
AWS introduced Amazon Redshift in 2012. S3 itself dates to 2006.
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