Amazon Redshift is a fully administered, petabyte-scale cloud-based data warehouse service. Users are able to begin with a minimal amount of gigabytes of data and can easily scale up to a petabyte or more as needed. This will enable them to utilize their own data to develop new intuitions on how to improve business processes and client relations.
Initially, users start to develop a data warehouse by initiating what is called an Amazon Redshift cluster or a set of nodes. Once the cluster has been provisioned, users can seamlessly upload data sets, and then begin to perform data analysis queries. Amazon Redshift delivers super-fast query performance, regardless of size, utilizing the exact SQL-based tools and BI applications that most users are already working with today.
The Amazon Redshift service performs all of the work of setting up, operating, and scaling a data warehouse. These tasks include provisioning capacity, monitoring and backing up the cluster, and applying patches and upgrades to the Amazon Redshift engine.
Amazon Redshift Functionalities
Amazon Redshift has many valuable key functionalities. Some of its most useful functionalities include:
-
Cluster administration: The Amazon Redshift cluster is a group of nodes that contains a leader node and one (or more) compute node(s). The compute nodes needed are dependent on the data size, amount of queries needed, and the query execution functionality desired.
-
Cluster snapshots: Snapshots are backups of a cluster from an exact point in time. Amazon Redshift offers two types of snapshots: manual and automated. Amazon will store these snapshots internally in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) utilizing an SSL connection. Whenever a Snapshot restore is needed, Amazon Redshift will create a new cluster and will import data from the snapshot as directed.
-
Cluster access: Amazon Redshift provides several intuitive features to help define connectivity rules, encrypt data and connections, and control the overall access of your cluster.
-
IAM credentials and AWS accounts: The Amazon Redshift cluster is only accessible by the AWS account that created the cluster. This automatically secures the cluster and keeps it safe. Inside the AWS account, users access the AWS Identity and IAM protocol to create additional user accounts and manage permissions, granting specified users the desired access needed to control cluster performance.
-
Encryption: Users have the option to choose to encrypt the clusters for additional added security once the cluster is provisioned. When encryption is enabled, Amazon Redshift will store all the data in user-created tables in a secure encrypted format. To manage Amazon Redshift encryption keys, users will access AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).
Reviews from Real Users
“Redshift's versioning and data security are the two most critical features. When migrating into the cloud, it's vital to secure the data. The encryption and security are there.” - Kundan A., Senior Consultant at Dynamic Elements AS
“With the cloud version whenever you want to deploy, you can scale up, and down, and it has a data warehousing capability. Redshift has many features. They have enriched and elaborate documentation that is helpful.”- Aishwarya K., Solution Architect at Capgemini
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is an end-to-end analytics solution that successfully combines analytical services to merge big data analytics and enterprise data warehouses into a single unified platform. The solution can run intelligent distributed queries among nodes, and provides the ability to query both relational and non-relational data.
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is built with these 4 components:
- Synapse SQL
- Spark
- Synapse Pipeline
- Studio
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Features
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics has many valuable key features, including:
-
Cloud Data Service: WIth Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics you can operate services (data analytics, machine learning, data warehousing, dashboarding, etc.) in a single workspace via the cloud.
-
Structured and unstructured data: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics supports both structured and unstructured data and allows you to manage relational and non-relational data - unlike data warehouses and lakes that tend to store them respectively.
-
Effective data storage: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics offers next-level data storage with high availability and different tiers.
-
Responsive data engine: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics uses Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) and is designed to handle large volumes of data and analytical workloads efficiently without any problems.
-
Several scripting languages: The solution provides language compatibility and supports different programming languages, such as Python, Java, Spark SQL, and Scala.
-
Query optimization: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics works well to facilitate limitless concurrency and performance optimization. It also simplifies workload management.
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Benefits
Some of the benefits of using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics include:
-
Database templates: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics offers industry-specific database templates that make it easy to combine and shape data.
-
Better business insights: With Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics you can expand discovery of insights from all your data and apply machine learning models to all your intelligent apps.
-
Reduce project development time: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics makes it possible to have a unified experience for developing end-to-end analytics, which reduces project development time significantly.
-
Eliminate data barriers: By using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you can perform analytics on operational and business apps data without data movement.
-
Advanced security: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics provides both advanced security and privacy features to ensure data protection.
-
Machine Learning: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics integrates Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, and Power BI.
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics users who are currently using the solution.
PeerSpot user Jael S., who is an Information Architect at Systems Analysis & Design Engineering, comments on her experience using the product, saying that it is “Scalable, intuitive, facilitates compliance and keeps your data secure”. She also says "We also like governance. It looks at what the requirements are for the company to identify the best way to ensure compliance is met when you move to the cloud."
Michel T., CHTO at Timp-iT, mentions that "the features most valuable are the simplicity, how easy it is to create a dashboard from different information systems."
A Senior Teradata Consultant at a tech services company says, "Microsoft provides both the platform and the data center, so you don't have to look for a cloud vendor. It saves you from having to deal with two vendors for the same task."
Vertica is a deploy-anywhere SQL database created for elasticity, speed, and advanced analytics. Vertica enables today’s busy teams to modernize their data warehouses, democratize data and analytics to enable increased access, and deploy analytics in a hybrid cloud environment. Additionally, Vertica merges how companies power their analytics by providing a scalable, open, and elastic database with numerous intuitive features.
In today’s marketplace, organizations are experiencing continued robust growth of data volumes, and citizen data scientists’ broader use of analytics is causing many companies to re-visit and re-examine their systems in order to match the demands of an aggressive marketplace. Analytics are continually swiftly evolving. New data from social media, blogs, IoT sources, data streams, gas and electrical grids, and mobile networks is being constantly gathered in extensive data sets. This presents organizations with a new opportunity to become more data driven, and they must be able to manage the new data growth and identify the trends and sequences that can lead to both improved business opportunities and continued repeat business from their clients.
Vertica Benefits:
Vertica has many valuable key benefits. Some of its most useful benefits include:
-
Efficiency: Vertica provides robust compression and intuitive impressions. This results in users requiring significantly less storage and hardware than other comparable data analytics solutions. The progressive Vertica architecture results in queries that are 10-50 times faster than other platforms while providing more storage data per server.
-
Integration: Each new iteration of Vertica is tested and certified with the latest ETL and visualization tools. It actively supports Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), and popular SQL providers. All these solutions and most leading BI and visualization tools interact seamlessly, making Vertica overall a very cost-effective solution and solid business investment.
-
Cloud flexibility: With Vertica, users do not have to get locked into a single cloud vendor. Users are able to take complete advantage of the current infrastructure that is already in place. Vertica seamlessly integrates with popular public clouds, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, AWS, Alibaba, VMware clouds, and more. It also provides for easy portability across on-premise and multi-cloud environments and data lakes. Vertica designs a robust flexible platform for running a company’s analytical and computing workloads, which allows applications to run simultaneously on numerous environments in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Vertica is able to seamlessly use public clouds and private data centers, and it grants the flexibility to switch in an instant.
-
Security: Vertica offers dynamic end-to-end security with support for partner solutions and industry-standard protocols such as Apache Sentry, AWS IAM, Kerberos, LDAP, and more. Vertica utilizes an intuitive layered security model that provides multiple security authentication authorization mechanisms. Vertica will also maintain an audit trail, natively exported to other security domains for analysis and persistence.
Reviews from Real Users
“I am using Vertica for aggregations and dashboards. The most valuable feature of Vertica is the ability to receive large aggregations at a very quick pace. The use case of subclusters is very good.” - Bijal S., Group Chief Technology Officer at Netcore Solutions
“The hardware usage and speed has been the most valuable feature of this solution. It is very fast and has saved us a lot of money.” - Munkhsaikhan B., Project Lead - Digital Transformation Unit at Bodi Electronics LLC
