What is the difference between Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS?

Amazon Redshift is a columnar data warehouse optimized for analytical queries (OLAP) on large datasets (petabytes). Amazon RDS is a relational database service for transactional workloads (OLTP) like web applications. Redshift excels at complex analytical queries; RDS is for standard CRUD operations with many concurrent users.

When should I use Amazon Redshift instead of RDS?

Use Amazon Redshift for business intelligence, data analytics, reporting, and running complex SQL queries across large historical datasets. Use RDS when you need a transactional relational database for web applications, e-commerce, or systems requiring frequent reads and writes with ACID compliance.

Can I use Amazon Redshift and RDS together?

Yes, many architectures use both. Operational data lives in RDS for transactional workloads, while historical data is periodically loaded into Redshift for analytics. AWS Data Pipeline, Glue, or DMS can automate data movement from RDS to Redshift for reporting and analytical queries.

Is Amazon Redshift more expensive than Amazon RDS?

Redshift and RDS have different pricing models. Redshift charges per node type and hour (e.g., ra3.xlplus starts at ~$0.38/hour). RDS charges per instance type and storage separately. For small datasets, RDS can be cheaper. Redshift becomes cost-effective at large data volumes due to its columnar compression and query performance.

Amazon Redshift vs Amazon RDS: Key Differences & When to Use Each

June 19, 2020 / Nirav Shah

What Is Amazon Redshift? Data Warehousing Service Overview

As Per AWS ‘Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, cloud-based, petabyte-scale data warehouse service by Amazon Web Services (AWS)”. It is an efficient solution to collect and store all your data and enables you to analyze it using various business intelligence tools to acquire new insights for your business and customers.

For an easy understanding, let us have a look at different aspects of Amazon Redshift.

Features Of Amazon Redshift

Cluster Management
Cluster Access and Security
Monitoring Clusters
Databases
- One database is automatically created by Amazon Redshift when you provision a cluster. By default, you can use this database for loading data and running queries on your data. Later, as per your requirement, you can add an additional database.
- To get new insights for your customers and business, Amazon Redshift is the perfect tool to have.
- You can use Amazon Redshift for data warehousing, significant corporate data processing, managing analytical databases for businesses and monitoring customer activity for statistics and analysis.
- Now that you know about Amazon Redshift let us now focus on Amazon RDS.

What Is Amazon RDS? Relational Database Service Overview

Per AWS “Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud”. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.
The benefits of having Amazon RDS are listed below.

What Are the Key Benefits of Amazon RDS?

Easy administration
- Shifting from project conception to deployment is easy with Amazon RDS. With it, you can eliminate the need for any infrastructure provisioning and the installation of any database software.

Highly Scalable
- With just only a few clicks, you can use Amazon RDS for scaling the compute database and storage resources.

Fast
- You can manage the demands of database applications using Amazon RDS at a fast pace. You are provided with two SSD-backed storage options to meet your requirements.

Secure
- You can easily control the network access to your database using Amazon RDS. In fact, you even get the option of isolating the database instances.

Inexpensive
- You can benefit the services of Amazon RDS at a meagre price. You can be sure of the fact that you would be paying only for the resources that you would be consuming. Nothing more and nothing less.
- The best part of Amazon RDS is that it is available on several database engines like PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, MariaDB, MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle Database. You can use Amazon Amazon RDS if you already have a database that needs to be offsite, you need a fast, scalable and durable application on the database and when there is an unrationed workflow which demands a highly scalable database.
- Now that you know both about Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS let us draw a quick comparison between both.

Amazon Redshift vs Amazon RDS: Key Differences Compared

You can use Amazon RDS for an operation on Primary data by using running software like SQL, Aurora, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and Maria DB. Amazon Redshift is an analytic database of Amazon with ParAccel technology, you can use it for crunching big data queries and heavy lifting.
The database engine of Amazon RDS includes MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle Database MariaDB, Amazon Aurora, and PostgreSQL while Amazon Redshift uses Redshift adapted PostgreSQL as the database engine. Computing resources of Amazon RDS include 64vCPU and 244GB RAM and Amazon Redshift includes nodes with vCPU and 244 GB RAM. The data storage facilities for Amazon RDS include 6 TB instances and it is 16 TB per Amazon Redshift.
You can use Amazon RDS for conventional databases and if you are looking forward to data warehousing, you can use Amazon Redshift.
Developers often choose Amazon Redshift because it is scalable and supports encryption, isolation and fast columnar storage. It is cheap and reliable and is considered to give the best cloud DW performance.
On the other hand, developers use Amazon RDS because of its compatibility with the various database engines, better performance, easy read scalability, fast speed, and low latency read replica.

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Nirav Shah

Nirav Shah is the Director of Eternal Web Pvt Ltd, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and certified Odoo Partner based in the UK. With over a decade of experience in cloud computing, digital transformation, and ERP implementation, Nirav helps enterprises adopt the right technology to solve complex business challenges. He specialises in AWS infrastructure, Odoo ERP, and web development solutions for businesses across the UK and beyond.