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DZone
dzone.com › data engineering › databases › rds, redshift, dynamodb, and aurora – how do they compare?
RDS, Redshift, DynamoDB, and Aurora – How Do They Compare?
April 3, 2020 - If you have standard scaling needs, RDS is the better option. If you have enterprise needs, and the time and budget, Redshift might be preferable depending on the types of queries you’ll be running.
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Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › deciding between rds and redshift for "data warehouse"
r/aws on Reddit: Deciding between RDS and Redshift for "data warehouse"
January 27, 2023 -

Hi all,

I have a business request to ETL data from several sources into a data warehouse to run BI tools on (Tableau or PowerBI for example).

The dataset isn't that big, 400GB growing 4GB per week. I can't find any good explanation on if I should use RDS or Redshift to store the data.

Can anyone with experience on this topic guide me please?

Thank you!

Discussions

amazon web services - Difference between RDS and Redshift - Stack Overflow
Can anyone list down the main differences between Amazon Redshift and RDS? I know both are relational DB's but why choose one over the other ? ... Save this answer. ... Show activity on this post. RDS is a managed service for Online Transaction Processing databases (OLTP), i.e. a managed service for the usual MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server or Aurora ... More on stackoverflow.com
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amazon web services - Is AWS Redshift to PostgreSQL the same as AWS Aurora to MySQL? - Stack Overflow
If you want data warehousing and ... consider Redshift as one of your options... though it's likely you haven't really outgrown PostgreSQL, just AWS RDS. Maybe you're looking for something more like Postgres-XL ? ... Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments. ... Thanks Craig, very informative. This is so different from where Aurora and Google's ... More on stackoverflow.com
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AWS RDS, Amazon Athena, Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Redshift
With its Massively Parallel Processing ... workloads. Using Amazon Redshift, you can also directly query data in open formats (such as Parquet or ORC) in the Amazon S3 data lake, or query data in operational databases, such as Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and MyS... More on repost.aws
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March 30, 2023
Deciding between RDS and Redshift for "data warehouse"
You can go for Aurora first then migrate to redshift when your data gets around 5Tb or so, that’s my estimate in which the query starts to get slow in a rds and dwh will be much faster More on reddit.com
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People also ask

Can DynamoDB be used by applications running on any operating system?
Yes. DynamoDB is a fully managed cloud service that you access via API. Applications running on any operating system (such as Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX) can use DynamoDB. We recommend using the AWS SDKs to get started with DynamoDB
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k21academy.com
k21academy.com › aws-cloud › aws-database-service-amazon-rds-aurora-dynamodb-elasticache
AWS Database Services | Amazon Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB
What type of indexing is used in DynamoDB?
DynamoDB supports two types of secondary indexes: Global secondary index — An index with a partition key and a sort key that can be different from those on the base table. A global secondary index is considered “global” because queries on the index can span all of the data in the base table, across all partitions.
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k21academy.com
k21academy.com › aws-cloud › aws-database-service-amazon-rds-aurora-dynamodb-elasticache
AWS Database Services | Amazon Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB
What about database encryption on AWS?
Amazon RDS encrypts your databases using keys you manage with the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). On a database instance running with Amazon RDS encryption, data stored at rest in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are its automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots.
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k21academy.com
k21academy.com › aws-cloud › aws-database-service-amazon-rds-aurora-dynamodb-elasticache
AWS Database Services | Amazon Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB
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The New Stack
thenewstack.io › home › amazon aurora vs. redshift: what you need to know
Amazon Aurora vs. Redshift: What You Need to Know - The New Stack
May 25, 2023 - Aurora also offers a low-cost pricing structure, enterprise-grade security features and the ability to scale with ease. With this service, businesses can build and maintain sophisticated applications that require high performance, scalability and availability. Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale data warehouse service that can store and analyze vast amounts of data quickly and easily.
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Medium
medium.com › @abylead › aws-database-overview-rds-vs-aurora-vs-redshift-vs-dynamodb-7eeebb61ca98
Amazon RDS vs Redshift vs DynamoDB Database
November 12, 2023 - Whereas Redshift offers you the largest tables and clusters, DynamoDB table and items are limited and smallest in size. Small and hefty comes to mind with DynamoDB’s highest availability and extreme scalability like Redshift.
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GeeksforGeeks
geeksforgeeks.org › dbms › difference-between-amazon-aurora-and-amazon-redshift
Difference between Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift - GeeksforGeeks
August 6, 2025 - It is approx five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. Features of Aurora have distributed fault-tolerant and self-healing storage system.
Find elsewhere
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Medium
medium.com › @singhsaloni890 › learning-aws-day-by-day-day-37-amazon-rds-redshift-and-aurora-overview-8bb396b22f77
Learning AWS Day by Day — Day 37 — Amazon RDS, RedShift and Aurora — Overview | by Saloni Singh | Medium
April 15, 2024 - - Allows you to create database in cloud that are managed by AWS - supports: Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, MS SQL server, Aurora (AWS proprietary database) Advantages over using RDS v/s deploying Database on EC2: - RDS is a managed service - Automated provisioning, OS patching - Continuous backups and restore to specific timestamp (Point-In-Time-Restore) - Monitoring dashboards - Multi-AZ setup for Disaster recovery - Maintenance window for upgrades - Scaling capability (vertical and horizontal) - Storage backed by EBS - Can’t SSH into instance · Amazon RedShift: - user columnar data storage - unlike SQL, data is not stored in rows but in columns, which is ideal for data warehousing.
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K21 Academy
k21academy.com › aws-cloud › aws-database-service-amazon-rds-aurora-dynamodb-elasticache
AWS Database Services | Amazon Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB
June 6, 2023 - Each cluster contains one or more databases and runs an Amazon Redshift engine. The type and number of compute nodes that you need depend on the size of your data, the number of queries you will execute, and the query execution performance that you need. Read More: About AWS Elastic Load Balancers. Click here · The managed relational database service offered by AWS is called Amazon Aurora.
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DataCamp
datacamp.com › blog › rds-vs-aurora
Amazon RDS vs Aurora: Which is Right For Your Data Workload? | DataCamp
March 23, 2025 - It is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL but offers improved throughput and reliability compared to standard RDS databases. Aurora achieves its performance by utilizing a distributed, multi-node architecture that automatically scales storage and provides failover capabilities with minimal ...
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AWS
docs.aws.amazon.com › databases-on-aws-how-to-choose
Choosing an AWS database service
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, cloud-based data warehousing service that handles large-scale analytics workloads. There are two high-level categories of AWS OLTP databases—relational and non-relational. ... The AWS relational database family includes eight popular engines for Amazon Aurora ...
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Faun
faun.pub › amazon-aurora-vs-amazon-rds-and-amazon-redshift-d34b8e9f81a1
Amazon Aurora vs Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift | by Supun Sandeeptha | FAUN.dev() 🐾
February 18, 2020 - The research scope expanded. In this article, I’m gonna compare Amazon Aurora with Amazon RDS and explain about Amazon Redshift.
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Hevo Data
hevodata.com › home › blog › data warehousing
Amazon Redshift vs Aurora: Comparison | Hevo
January 27, 2026 - Aurora is better for transactional workloads and applications that require high availability and low-latency access to data. Redshift, on the other hand, is optimized for analytical workloads, providing fast query performance on large datasets ...
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TechTarget
techtarget.com › searchcloudcomputing › tip › When-to-use-Amazon-RDS-vs-Redshift
When to use Amazon RDS vs. Redshift | TechTarget
Redshift can store many large data sets, up to 128 TB per node, potentially reaching petabytes of data in a cluster. Most RDS engines have a storage limit of 70 TB, while Aurora has a limit of 140 TB. Redshift is limited only by external data ...
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YouTube
youtube.com › watch
AWS S3 Vs. DynamoDB Vs. RDS Aurora Vs. Redshift - YouTube
In this video, we will describe the differences between AWS S3, RDS Aurora, Redshift, and DynamoDB.If you like this content, please check out the following t...
Published   August 1, 2021
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Redshift is not PostgreSQL. It is a column store engine that uses a very heavily modified part of a very old PostgreSQL version as its front-end. Under the hood it's powered by ParAccel, a very heavily modified fork of PostgreSQL 8.0.2.

Imagine someone took MySQL 4.1 or something from that era, deleted InnoDB and MyISAM, added their own hardwired storage engine, removed a whole bunch of features and added a bunch of different ones - changing the supported SQL dialect in the process. That gives you some idea.

It's a dramatically different product for different needs. It's heavily optimised for OLAP workloads and pays a heavy price for OLTP workloads.

In general you should use PostgreSQL (on AWS RDS, or elsewhere) for your day to day transaction processing. If you want data warehousing and analytics and have outgrown PostgreSQL for that then you might consider Redshift as one of your options... though it's likely you haven't really outgrown PostgreSQL, just AWS RDS.

Maybe you're looking for something more like Postgres-XL ?

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The other answer is accurate regarding Redshift not being the PostgreSQL equivalent of Aurora. Generally you'd use Redshift when you needed to run some very heavy queries on a large dataset (the stuff that might take hours or more to finish running). Redshift is a columnar datastore that essentially auto-normalizes every piece of data that comes in and can execute queries that would otherwise take days in seconds. When you're done, you delete it and then repeat the process when you need it again.

In terms of getting an Aurora equivalent for PostgreSQL, I don't know how far off that is but I'm pretty sure an enterprising person could build their own with AWS EFS (https://aws.amazon.com/efs/). I'm fairly certain that's a big part of the Aurora formula.

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Ritza
ritza.co › articles › gen-articles › rds-vs-aurora-vs-dynamodb-vs-redshift-vs-rdp-vs-ttn
rds vs. aurora vs. dynamodb vs. redshift vs. rdp vs. ttn - Ritza Articles
Consider RDS if you need a managed relational database service for transactional applications with support for multiple database engines. Consider Redshift if you need a scalable data warehouse solution optimized for analytical queries and ...
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Folio3
cloud.folio3.com › home › amazon aurora vs redshift: a comprehensive comparison in 2024
Amazon Aurora vs Redshift: A Comprehensive Comparison in 2024
January 25, 2024 - Aurora stands out with its SSD-based storage subsystem, which enables it to deliver enhanced I/O performance. It also offers features like replication for scaling read operations and automated backups with extended retention periods, to ensure ...
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Amazon Athena is well suited for interactive analytics and exploration of data in your data lake or any data source through an extensible connector framework without worrying about ingesting or processing data. Amazon Athena is built on open-source engines and frameworks such as Spark, Presto, and Apache Iceberg, giving customers the flexibility to use Python or SQL or work on open data formats. If customers want to do ***interactive analytics*** using open-source frameworks and data formats, Amazon Athena is a great place to start. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse. With its Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture that separates storage and compute and machine learning led automatic optimization capabilities, a data warehouse like Amazon Redshift, whether it's serverless or provisioned, is a great choice for customers that need the best price performance at any scale for ***complex BI and analytics workloads***. Using Amazon Redshift, you can also directly query data in open formats (such as Parquet or ORC) in the Amazon S3 data lake, or query data in operational databases, such as Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and MySQL. Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-scale business intelligence (BI) service that you can use to deliver easy-to-understand insights to the people who you work with, wherever they are. Amazon QuickSight connects to your data in the cloud and combines data from many different sources. Here is a document on the Modern Data architecture with AWS which gives an idea on how the purpose built services can be used together. [https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/datalakes-and-analytics/modern-data-architecture/]