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AWS RedShift Vs SQL Server – War Verdict

AWS RedShift Vs SQL Server – War Verdict

Are you keen on moving your BI setup from on-premise to the cloud? Are you wondering whether moving to AWS Redshift is worth the effort? Find answers to these and more – the post you’ve been waiting for is here! We pitted SQL Server against a giant contender, the AWS Redshift, in a typical BI Setup.

You must be living under a rock if you haven’t already foreseen that Redshift won this battle. What amazes us, is the measure by which Redshift won. For those of you who need a heads up on the prowess of Redshift, read AWS Redshift – 5 reasons to make the shift!

SETTING UP

  • On-premise
    • BI – WebFOCUS
    • DB – SQL Server
    • Data – 10 million records
  • Cloud
    • BI – WebFOCUS Cloud
    • DB – AWS Redshift Data Warehouse
    • Data – 10 million records
  • Dashboard
    • A typical Sales Dashboard by different Regions, Products, Vendors and by Location
WebFOCUS Sales Dashboard - Should we move data to Redshift?
WebFOCUS Sales Dashboard

The dashboard is a healthy mix of charts and KPIs and we’ve closely based it on an actual firm’s data – 4 KPIs, 6 charts and a Map to be precise.

REDSHIFT SETUP GUIDELINES

Our Redshift setup was designed around 3 basics:

1. Sort Key – When you create a table, you can specify one or more columns as the sort key. Amazon Redshift stores your data on disk in sorted order according to the sort key.

2. Distribution Styles – Distribution Style is a table property which dictates how that table’s data is distributed throughout the cluster.

KEY distribution – The rows are distributed according to the values in one column. The leader node will attempt to place matching values on the same node slice.

EVEN distribution – The rows are distributed across the slices in a round-robin fashion, regardless of the values in any column.

ALL distribution – A copy of the entire table is distributed to every node.

3. Compression Encodings – Compression is a column-level operation that reduces the size of data when it is stored. Compression conserves storage space and reduces the size of data that is read from storage, which reduces the amount of disk I/O and therefore improves query performance.

 

Pro tip – migrating 10 million records to AWS Redshift is not for novices. To know how we did it in minutes instead of days – click here!

SQL SERVER VS REDSHIFT – THE VERDICT

Here are the actual results from our test lab. You can clearly see how Redshift lives up to the promise of 10x faster querying speeds!

STATS

Not 1 lap, not 2 laps, but Redshift won by a good 10 laps!

 

Environment Setup
On Premise – WebFOCUS and SQL Server In Cloud – WebFOCUS and Redshift
Chart Name Process Time in Secs Process Time in Secs
Sales from Northeast 06.343 00.127
Sales from Midwest 06.525 00.570
Sales from South 04.077 00.209
Sales from West 02.927 00.155
Top 10 States by Sales 13.595 01.473
Top 10 Vendors by Sales 32.631 03.010
Top 10 Product Types by Sales 15.148 02.476
On-line Vs In-store for the past 12 months 48.683 03.940
Year Over Year Sales Comparison 09.971 00.326
Sales by States 06.204 00.568
Overall Sales by Location 22.689 03.679
Total Time to load dashboard 50 6

Migrate your data to Redshift - Cloud migration services by Amtex BI, New York

COMPRESSION RESULTS

Redshift with Data Compressed Redshift without Data Compressed
Chart Name Process Time in Secs Process Time in Secs
Sales from Northeast 00.127 00.127
Sales from Midwest 00.570 00.570
Sales from South 00.144 00.209
Sales from West 00.155 00.155
Top 10 States by Sales 02.751 01.473
Top 10 Vendors by Sales 04.663 03.010
Top 10 Product Types by Sales 03.664 02.476
On-line Vs In-store for the past 12 months 05.820 03.940
Year Over Year Sales Comparison 00.180 00.326
Sales by States 00.216 00.568
Overall Sales by Location 05.933 03.679
Total Time to load dashboard 9 6
Number of Rows in Table Data Compressed Size in GB
10,284,522 Y 1.1 GB
10,284,522 N 3.5 GB

While the query time increases when data is compressed, Redshift’s compression saves about 60% disk space, which is impressive.

MIGRATE THE AMTEX WAY

How wonderful would it be, if migrating to Redshift was as easy as seating your data in the Ferrari of data warehousing? Well we’re holding the door open for you. We ditch the traditional ETL paradigm when it comes to loading up data into Redshift – ELT helps us monetize on the MPP architecture of Redshift.

Allow Amtex BI to put you on the fast lane of cloud migration.

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