Redshift Research Project

Introduction

This not your typical site, with advice like "pick a good distribution key". This is low-level, detailed, comprehensive research. If you do any kind of serious work with Redshift, the content here will blow you away.

The core content are the white papers, but there are a growing number of Redshift tracking/monitoring pages.

About Me

My name is Max Ganz II. I began using Redshift the very day it went to GA - I was the engineer in a Stateside three-man startup, and we were trying to get into the Redshift beta programme when GA happened. I then used Redshift intensively (think 80 hour weeks) for a year and a half, and ended up having a monthly one-to-one meeting with one of the Redshift team managers, and one or two features in Redshift today come from those meetings, such as the ALL distribution style.

Before this, I was (and still am) a C programmer; working with all the fundamentals of computing, a kernel developer, and with a particular interest in data structures, which led me to databases, and I wrote my own relational database, in C, from scratch, where the combined understanding of computing fundamentals and databases put me in the ideal position to move into data engineering.

Fast-forward to about seven years ago and I picked up the Redshift thread once more, with some contract work, and then with a view to writing a book, which came in the end to be this web-site, and the research and monitoring published here, and Combobulator, a browser-based PII and regulatory safe Redshift management application, distributed as an AMI, and providing consultancy services.

Resources

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