All stacks · Warehouses & analytics
RA3, Spectrum, concurrency scaling, and the AWS warehouse.
Amazon RedshiftCOMPOUND sort keys and DISTKEY still decide scans on RA3. VACUUM and ANALYZE are not optional. Spectrum SELECT * is an S3 bill. Concurrency scaling will surprise you.
AWSS3, Glue, Kinesis, Redshift, Athena, EMR, Lambda — a map of the AWS data services, what each is actually for, and the combinations that work in practice.
AWSA production comparison of Redshift Serverless and Snowflake: how RPU-seconds differ from credits, where each one bends under concurrency, and what actually breaks in a migration.
Amazon Redshift is still the warehouse on many AWS estates: RA3 managed storage, Spectrum on S3, concurrency scaling, and a distribution/sort-key model that punishes you if you pretend it is Snowflake.
These notes sit next to the Redshift vs Snowflake comparison. Learn sort keys, WLM, and why SELECT * on a 400-column fact is a Spectrum tax.
Redshift if the org is AWS-only, IAM-centric, and already pays for Spectrum/S3. Snowflake if you want multi-cloud, sharing, and less WLM archaeology. Both can query Iceberg now — the lock-in is people and IAM, not files.
Missing or stale sort keys, SELECT *, and Spectrum over unpartitioned Parquet. EXPLAIN and STL tables tell you. Adding nodes to hide a bad sort key is how the bill grows.
Fewer cluster tickets, same SQL sins. Serverless still meters RPU. A bad dashboard on a 10 TB fact will find the credit card.
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