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Amazon Redshift says it executes data operations ten times faster than other enterprise data warehouses because of a hardware-accelerated cache called Advanced Query Accelerator (AQUAD). It also claims three times better price-performance than other similar technologies. Statements like these are what make Redshift an attractive option for companies that want to push data into a warehouse for analytics. 

While Redshift remains a solid choice for data integration, pushing data into the platform can be difficult, especially if users lack advanced coding skills or the time or resources to create complex data pipelines. 

Is there an easier way to carry out data integration on Amazon Redshift?

Below, Integrate.io explains the different methods of integrating data with Redshift and how an ETL tool simplifies the entire process. 

Integrate.io is a data warehouse solution that extracts, transforms, and loads your data into Amazon Redshift for powerful BI analytics. Start your 7-day trial now.

Read more: Allowing Integrate.io Access to My Redshift Cluster

Why Do You Need to Integrate Data With Redshift?

Enterprises like yours analyze large amounts of big data to unlock business-critical information, such as trends, patterns, customer behaviors, financial information, and other insights. For big data analysis to happen, an organization needs a 'single source of truth' for all data across its enterprise. Transferring data to a single location makes it easier to run data through third-party business intelligence (BI) tools, which use techniques such as machine learning and predictive analysis to generate real-time reports. 

The easiest way to generate BI is to integrate data with a data warehouse like Amazon Redshift. It is part of Amazon Web Services alongside solutions such as Amazon ec2, Amazon Sagemaker, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and AWS Secrets Manager. Each Amazon Redshift cluster contains one or more databases for storing information. Once data integration is complete, organizations can access BI insights within the warehouse and use this information to influence sales, customer service, marketing, and other functions. Amazon Redshift Spectrum is a serverless feature of Redshift that lets you run SQL queries from data stored in Amazon S3 buckets. 

Many organizations choose Redshift because of its speed, scalability, and customer service. Redshift currently has an average user score of 4.3/5 on the review website G2.com, making it one of the most popular data warehouses in the world. Users praise its ease of use, enhanced security, and cost savings. 

Read more: Amazon Redshift: Comprehensive Guide

How to Execute Data Integration on Amazon Redshift

Pushing large data loads into Redshift can consume considerable computing resources and take a long time, and the method you use might impact query performance. Amazon recommends using the 'copy' command to load data from Amazon EMR, Amazon S3, and other data sources on remote hosts. Then it suggests splitting load data, compressing files, and using staging tables. 

Is there a better way to integrate data?

Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) is a process that extracts data sets from databases and other sources, transforms them into a suitable format for analytics, and loads them into a data warehouse such as Redshift. Big data pipelines facilitate this method, ensuring data flows seamlessly from its source to a warehouse. You can create these pipelines yourself using code, or you can invest in an ETL tool that automates the process. 

Creating Redshift ETL pipelines is a difficult proposition for most small- and medium-sized businesses that lack a large data engineering team. That's because it involves tasks such as parallelism, connecting databases, SQL commands, ODBC, JDBC, deployments, API calls, permissions, copy commands, concurrency scaling, endpoints, creating IAM roles, dealing with JSON files, managing a query editor, and job scheduling. As a result, many organizations search for an ETL platform to do the hard work for them. 

AWS Glue is Amazon's ETL tool that crawls data from several sources, transforms the data, and prepares it for analytics. However, Glue doesn't natively interact with Redshift; it connects to it like any other database. These limitations might present issues such as:

  • Problems when scaling the Amazon Redshift data warehouse to meet data requirements
  • Turning up slow Amazon Redshift queries
  • Users requiring an advanced skill set to move data into AWS accounts

AWS recommends several third-party tools to integrate data with Redshift. These tools include:

Fivetran

Fivetran is an ETL solution that moves data to the Amazon Redshift database via pipelines. With it, you can also customize your integrations. However, Fivetran's pricing model has changed to a consumption-based one, meaning users pay for all the data they use. This model works out to be both more expensive for many businesses while also incurring a more volatile cost from month-to-month

Informatica PowerCenter

Like Fivetran, Informatica PowerCenter moves data to the Redshift cloud data warehouse. However, it's one of the most complicated ETL solutions and requires an advanced skill set to query data. This means hidden costs for many organizations because it necessitates re-allocating highly skilled labor away from a core product focus and other critical projects. PowerCenter is also part of a larger suite of data management products from Informatica, which means users might be paying for features they don't require.

SnapLogic

SnapLogic is a high-performance integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that connects data sources to Redshift via the cloud. While reviews state that the tool pushes data into Redshift, they also reveal that it struggles with large data loads and real-time updates. 

Is there an alternative solution?

Read more: Offload ETL from Redshift to Integrate.io

How Integrate.io Helps With Data Integration on Amazon Redshift

Integrate.io is an ETL solution that pushes large data loads into the Amazon Redshift console with little human input. That's because, unlike AWS Glue, the platform offers an automatic native Redshift connector that extracts data from multiple locations, transforms data for analytics, and loads to Amazon's data warehouse. Integrate.io aggregates data from your sources, cleans and configures it, ensures it complies with data sharing and governance regulations, and pushes it to Redshift; this way, you can generate BI insights from tools such as Looker, Zoho, and Tableau. You can use these insights to solve problems in your organization, optimize workflows, and make better decisions. 

In addition, Integrate.io's drag-and-drop, point-and-click interface makes data integration on Amazon Redshift easier than it's ever been. Plus, you only pay for the native connectors you need and not the amount of data you use, which could prove more cost-effective for teams. Even those with no coding skills can use this platform to access data insights.

It's not just the Amazon Redshift data warehouse. There are no-code/low-code native connectors for on-premises databases, cloud databases, data lakes, and data-warehouses such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, and PostgreSQL. You can also share data with other AWS services, such as Amazon RDS and AWS Lambda.

Now you can move data across your enterprise in minutes without knowing SQL or Python. 

Other Integrate.io features include:

  • World-class customer support via telephone, email, live chat, and more.
  • Compliance with international data security standards and data governance frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, SOC 2, and SSL/TLS. 
  • A REST API that lets you create your own data pipelines. You can customize headers, API parameters, and data fields, and then move data between various locations quickly without worrying about schema problems.
  • A Salesforce-to-Salesforce connector that extracts Salesforce data, transforms it, and then loads it back to Salesforce.
  • Integrate.io currently has an average user score of 4.3/5 on G2.com, showing it is one of the most popular ETL solutions on the market. 

Integrate.io is a warehousing solution for data integration on Amazon Redshift. Transfer data from various sources with Integrate.io's native Redshift connector and improve your workflows. Start your 7-day trial now.