AWS
aws.amazon.com › blogs › big-data › optimize-your-workloads-with-amazon-redshift-serverless-ai-driven-scaling-and-optimization
Optimize your workloads with Amazon Redshift Serverless AI-driven scaling and optimization | Amazon Web Services
October 30, 2024 - Create a Redshift Serverless workgroup. For instructions, see Creating a workgroup with a namespace. While creating the workgroup, choose Performance and Cost Controls and Price-performance target, and adjust the slider to Optimized for performance.
What can I do about redshift slowness?
You can find a list of community-submitted learning resources here: https://dataengineering.wiki/Learning+Resources I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns. More on reddit.com
Experiences with Redshift Serverless
We tested it out and during preview it didn’t make sense for our workloads. Performance wasn’t good enough and the fact that you could only have one per account was a major hinderance. Now that the price was lowered and you can have multiple endpoints per account, we’re going to re-evaluate and re-test in the coming months. We have dozens of clusters and I believe once the reservations are up within the next 36 months we’ll switch some of the lesser powered ones over to redshift serverless. More on reddit.com
Why is Redshift a no-go?
I've used Redshift heavily at a couple places now over the past 5 years. In that time I also got to use BigQuery, Snowflake, Hive, Spark, and Athena. It's a little absurd how many options we have at this point, such as Clickhouse, Firebolt, Pinot, Druid, and the list goes on. The point is, Redshift isn't bad, but it's worse in many ways compared to competition. Redshift does have role based access now, but it's implemented strangely and makes it confusing how to use it with groups. Realistically, that should have been prioritized 6-7 years ago when Redshift had already been out for several years. Redshift finally came up with a way to separate storage and compute with RA3 and Spectrum, but it's still not elastic compute like Snowflake where you can just create another cluster with no downtime and no impact on running queries. Redshift has worked really hard on using probabilistic methods and ML to do internal optimizations for query performance and table structure, but sometimes it gets it really wrong and is hard to impossible to debug without just turning those features off (when you even can). Take auto materialized views as an example. They suck. I'm not going into it, but it's a half assed implementation. BigQuery, Snowflake, and Spark all have far more sophisticated query planners and optimizers that are easier to tune. When it comes down to it, taking advantage of sort and dist keys, data types, and compression encodings is by far the best thing you can do with Redshift in order to maximize efficiency, reduce costs, and get the best developer/analyst experience, which just feels antiquated once you start using other options. I don't have Redshift by any means. It's like Airflow to me. I know it really well at this point and that makes me productive with it, but also I use anything else and feel like an idiot wasting time on this stuff. More on reddit.com
Flawed Redshift Pricing Comparisons
Redshift is almost always cheaper than snowflake even with auto suspend. Redshift is so under rated these days. More on reddit.com
Videos
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AWS re:Invent 2021 - {New Launch} Introducing Amazon Redshift ...
AWS
docs.aws.amazon.com › amazon redshift › management guide › amazon redshift serverless › monitoring queries and workloads with amazon redshift serverless
Monitoring queries and workloads with Amazon Redshift Serverless - Amazon Redshift
You might need to tune queries that are not meeting SLA requirements either from the start, or have degraded over time. To tune, you must have runtime details including run plan, statistics, duration, and resource consumption. You need baseline data for offending queries to determine the cause ...
GitHub
github.com › Sudarshan-Prakash-Chavan › Best-Practices-for-AWS-Redshift-Cluster-and-Redshift-Serverless
GitHub - Sudarshan-Prakash-Chavan/Best-Practices-for-AWS-Redshift-Cluster-and-Redshift-Serverless: This project outlines best practices for deploying and managing Amazon Redshift clusters and Redshift Serverless on AWS. It includes deployment instructions, workload management configurations, monitoring strategies, maintenance tips, and performance tuning to ensure high availability, security, and performance. · GitHub
Redshift Serverless automatically manages workloads, allocating resources as needed. Monitor performance through the console and adjust scaling options based on usage patterns.
Author Sudarshan-Prakash-Chavan
Pump
pump.co › home › blog › how redshift serverless can save you money and time
How Redshift Serverless Can Save You Money and Time
March 7, 2025 - Fine-Tune Base and Max RPUs: Set lower base RPUs first to reduce idl costs, and increase the cap RPU to a more reasonable figure for busy periods. Spend and performance are intertwined; find a sweet spot for both. Clean Up Unused Stuff: Get rid of tables, schemas, and snapshots you don’t need anymore. Set retention limits for backups to prevent unnecessary storage costs. Use Auto-Pause and Reservations: With Redshift serverless, enable auto-pause and stop incurring charges during downtime.
AWS re:Post
repost.aws › articles › ARgjBkzVOpRAOvpNe5LExaLw › amazon-redshift-cost-optimization-best-practices
Amazon Redshift Cost Optimization best practices | AWS re:Post
June 24, 2025 - Although Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically scales to meet workload demands, implementing RPU limits is crucial for cost management Setting maximum RPU hours can help you meet your price/performance requirements while maintaining predictable costs.
AWS re:Post
repost.aws › articles › AREYT7zP-8SSCGG_ynTgkYpg › amazon-redshift-serverless-monitoring-queries-and-troubleshooting-performance-using-system-sys-views
Amazon Redshift Serverless: Monitoring Queries and Troubleshooting Performance using system(SYS) views | AWS re:Post
August 4, 2025 - Regularly review alerts and recommendations from the Redshift Advisor and implement them to optimize cluster performance. Amazon Redshift Serverless billing is based on RPU (Redshift Processing Unit) hours per second, charged only when queries ...
Noise
noise.getoto.net › 2025 › 03 › 10 › unlock-the-power-of-optimization-in-amazon-redshift-serverless
Unlock the power of optimization in Amazon Redshift Serverless | Noise
Users can either set a base capacity, ... to diverse workload requirements and employs intelligent resource management, automatically adjusting resources during query execution for optimal performance....
AWS
aws.amazon.com › about-aws › whats-new › 2026 › 04 › amazon-redshift-serverless-ai-driven-scaling-default
Amazon Redshift Serverless AI-driven scaling is now the default for new workgroups - AWS
1 week ago - Amazon Redshift Serverless now makes AI-driven scaling and optimization the default for all new workgroups. AI-driven scaling uses machine learning to predict compute needs and automatically adjust resources before queries queue, delivering better price-performance without manual tuning.
AWS
docs.aws.amazon.com › amazon redshift › management guide › amazon redshift serverless › compute capacity for amazon redshift serverless
Compute capacity for Amazon Redshift Serverless - Amazon Redshift
With Amazon Redshift Serverless compute capacity scales automatically up and down to match your workload requirements. Compute capacity refers to the processing power and memory allocated to your Amazon Redshift Serverless workloads. Common use cases include handling peak traffic periods, running ...
Codegive
codegive.com › blog › redshift_serverless_autoscaling.php
Redshift Serverless Autoscaling (2026): Master Effortless Scalability & Slash Costs – Uncover Its True Power!
March 29, 2026 - Redshift Serverless autoscaling automatically adjusts its compute capacity (Redshift Processing Units or RPUs) up or down based on your workload demands, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency without manual provisioning.
Medium
pdeyhim.medium.com › redshift-serverless-and-unexplainable-query-compile-latency-94e4eeb38946
Redshift Serverless: RPU and impact on query latency | by Parviz Deyhim | Medium
May 10, 2023 - In this blog post I’m focusing on understanding what happens to the overall performance as we increase the RPU. I’ll kick things off with a benchmark using the default RPU setting of 128. The results? You can check them out on the right-hand panel of this page (you’ll need to log in to see them). Next, I’ll tweak the Redshift RPU down to 64 and run the benchmark all over again.
DevOpsSchool
devopsschool.com › tutorials › aws-amazon-redshift-serverless-tutorial-architecture-pricing-use-cases-and-hands-on-guide-for-analytics
AWS Amazon Redshift Serverless Tutorial: Architecture, Pricing, Use Cases, and Hands-On Guide for Analytics – Tutorials
3 weeks ago - Instead: – Check the official ... Redshift Serverless”) For production, focus less on “hourly price” and more on: – peak concurrency windows (dashboard bursts), – SLAs for query latency, – data growth (GB-month), – orchestration schedules (batch jobs), – and governance overhead (logging, backup retention). A practical approach: 1. Baseline workload with representative queries. 2. Measure RPU usage during peak periods. 3. Tune schemas/queries ...
Codegive
codegive.com › blog › redshift_serverless_documentation.php
Redshift Serverless Documentation: Unlock Its Power & Avoid Costly Pitfalls (2024 Guide)
Understanding RSU consumption, ... and best practices for cost-efficient operations. Performance Tuning: While Redshift Serverless handles scaling automatically, query design still impacts performance....
Reddit
reddit.com › r/dataengineering › what can i do about redshift slowness?
r/dataengineering on Reddit: What can I do about redshift slowness?
May 6, 2023 -
Hi Reddit DE - I'm a data analyst that changed jobs to join a dinosaur working with Redshift. I was previously working with Bigquery for SQL scripts, where just looking at table samples (e.g. SELECT * FROM table LIMIT 5) took microseconds. Under the AWS Redshift architecture, these same table sampling jobs now take 3+ minutes and I'm going crazy.
The admins have set up resources dedicated under a user cluster, so things could be worse, but is there anything small you suggest I push for to make life more bearable? I think I need to start by asking for more 2x, 3x more resource slots, but please stop me if this sounds stupid.
Top answer 1 of 21
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I work with Redshift and a similar query for me would never take more than a second let alone multiple minutes, so the issue you're seeing strikes me as not inherent to Redshift. Have you raised the issue with the teams who manage those resources? If someone told me it took 3+ mins for SELECT * FROM table LIMIT 5 that would indicate a deeper problem that needed to be solved.
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Redshift is columnar based so in an instance of select * you’re literally doing the most inefficient thing you could do, because it must scan every column as a file. Redshift shines in areas like incremental aggregation. Anything that requires a lot of small aggregates combined together will perform tremendously better in a columnar based structure than a row based structure like MySQL. But anything that is scanning big data across many columns is awful, even with really efficient indexing. A row based database is good at performing a few large queries. A columnar based database is good at performing many small queries