Getting Started with Amazon Redshift

If you're interested in Redshift, rooting for it to succeed as a viable enterprise data warehouse, but worried about being an early adopter, this is the place to start. If you want to get a second opinion on the product, this is definitely a good place to start. It's like sitting down with an experienced developer and getting all his color commentary on the capabilities, limitations, pluses, and minuses of the system. You still need Amazon's (excellent) docs and guides. The author doesn't rehash a lot of the free and extensive content found there. Instead, he offers suggestions, considerations, examples, and a few of his own experiences. Very helpful.The Kindle formatting was fine.

$30 + shipping for a thin book that provides very little in the way of practical information. With the wealth of documentation/information that is already available from Amazon, I learned precisely nothing from when this arrived yesterday. Additionally - the quality of the book is very poor, it arrived bent and with some water damage (the package was unharmed - so it was like that prior to being shipped). Returning the book ASAP.

Good introduction to RedShift, would be great with more practical examples.

All of the official documentation for Redshift is available for free from Amazon, so this book is not attempting to be an official user manual for Redshift. Rather, it is passing information to the reader in a friendly manner, with additional commentary on how things differ from other systems on the market. This is helpful, since the official documentation focuses more on what Redshift does, while this book also highlights what it doesn't do (such as unsupported SQL commands). The book also makes it easier to come up-to-speed with Redshift because it is being explained by someone who has already had to 'climb the learning curve' and is now explaining this in a less-formal manner, with frequent emphasis on difficult or 'different than normal' topics.The author's style is informal and friendly, but sometimes overly talkative. For example, there are some paragraphs that occupy a whole page and sound like they were written for a blog, without much formal editing. Many concepts are thrown in without a lot of background, so it may be difficult for somebody without much previous experience in databases and data warehousing, but the typical reader who is interested in learning about Redshift probably comes from such a background anyway.If you're looking to learn Redshift and you've found the official documentation a bit dry or difficult, then this book will give you similar information in a friendly and more 'personal' manner. Please note that, as an online product, new features are continually being added to Redshift so some portions of this book are already outdated.Here's a quick outline of the book:CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEWThe book begins with a fairly informal chat about Redshift, its pricing and how it will likely affect the Data Warehouse marketplace.CHAPTER 2: TRANSITION TO REDSHIFTThis chapter talks through the creation of a Redshift cluster and then gets down into technical detail, showing what standard SQL functions are NOT supported by Redshift. It also covers accessing Redshift via command-line and via SQL tools.CHAPTER 3: LOADING YOUR DATA INTO REDSHIFTAs the author says, "this is where the fun starts". Topics include schema and table creation, loading data from Amazon S3 (which was the only method available at the time of publishing), plus a bit on performance monitoring and tips on optimising table design (using Redshift's Sort and Distribution Keys). Truth be told, data loading is where typical Redshift users end up spending most of their time.CHAPTER 4: MANAGING YOUR DATAThis covers snapshots, resizing, vacuuming of tables and workload management (which is the low-level management of job queues). These topics are important once your cluster is up and running and you'd like to improve performance or move into 'production' mode for your system.CHAPTER 5: QUERYING DATANot so much a lesson in SQL, but rather information for people already familiar with SQL but considering a move to Redshift. Special tables and the EXPLAIN command are covered, plus tips on JOINs, INSERTs, etc. You won't learn data warehousing from this chapter, but if you're familiar with an existing system then you'll come to understand the subtle differences with Redshift. Some SQL code samples are included in this chapter.CHAPTER 6: BEST PRACTICESThis final chapter is a random collection of remaining topics such as security and monitoring

Read this book, weak content. Pity there isn't any other choice.

This was a while ago a very rare book on the new Amazon Redshift. But for a book written in 2013, I expected significantly more information than what I already found on the online Amazon portal. It might be just the fact the rapid evolution of Redshift makes such a book obsolete. Still, good reading.

Stefan Bauer's Getting Started with Amazon Redshift is a practical introduction into how you might use Amazon Redshift. Although not exactly a step-by-step how-to tutorial, Bauer delivers plenty of details on what you need to do, how you should do it and why you should consider what you are about to do. If you want someone to hold your hand so you can claim you used Redshift, this book might not meet your needs. If you already have some data management experience, you will appreciate Bauer sharing his challenges and excitement with Amazon Redshift's powerful capabilities.Bauer's explanation for why a columnar database matters is the best I ever read. His conversational style makes this book easy to read and understand. He balances the existing strengths of Amazon Redshift with the rapidly evolving enhancements and tool partnerships. His description of his day-to-day experiences delivers far more value than any sales demonstration.I learned a lot from this book and recommended it to my colleagues. If you are interested in the practical usage of Amazon Redshift, I also recommend this book to you.

Amazon have done it again and set the bar extremely high with their initial warehouse-in-the-cloud offering. RedShift has delivered a product at a price point that will leave many an enterprise wondering why they have just signed that 6 figure purchase order to Microsoft/Oracle or IBM.This book is a fantastic overview on Redshift and the power it can bring.Beautifully articulated, taking the reader through the whole process from initial cluster creation, to data loading, querying and monitoring (he labored on that one quite a bit).There is a great piece on the different types of compression that I found interesting and while I know most of them, I haven't read them explained in such an easy to understand way before.