A decade later, cloud data warehouses displaced on-premises big data management, which provided much more flexibility and greatly reduced the complexity of managing data in distributed environments. Amazon launched Redshift in 2012, revolutionizing the landscape for enterprise data and analytics.
As a massively parallel processing database (MPP), Redshift processed queries 10 to 1000x faster than online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.1 While Redshift wasn’t the first MPP database, the $160 monthly price tag democratized use compared to prohibitively expensive proprietary offerings that cost upwards of $100,000 annually. With widespread access to speed, a whole environment of business intelligence (BI) tools sprang up around Redshift.iv