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Amazon announces “Redshift” cloud data warehouse, with Jaspersoft support

Amazon Web Services steps into the world of cloud-based data warehousing, and Jaspersoft's right there with them.
Written by Andrew Brust, Contributor

In Las Vegas today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is having its first ever AWS re:Invent conference, catering to partners and customers of Amazon's cloud platform.  And for the worlds of BI and Big Data, Amazon’s announcing what could be a ground-breaking new offering: its "Redshift" Data Warehouse as a Service.

Partners Gathering
While details are still forthcoming, there are already partnerships forming.  Specifically, open source BI provider Jaspersoft announced its support for Redshift today as well. The company explained that its data visualization and analytics technology can integrate with Redshift, and can be used in a standalone fashion or be embedded within applications.  Jaspersoft can connect to Redshift whether the former is running on-premise or in the cloud.

Amazon's Web site for Redshift also notes MicroStrategy as a Redshift partner.

Is it Big Data?
Amazon is pitching Redshift as a Big Data platform and Jaspersoft is pitching its support of Redshift as a Big Data analytics solution.  According to Jaspersoft personnel, Redshift is a relational data warehouse of Amazon's own fashioning, that can handle multi-terabyte and even petabyte-scale data volumes.  And AWS' site makes it clear that Redshift employs a clustered, Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture, which would be necessary for such workloads.  AWS' site also suggests that, like many MPP products, Redshift is based on PostgreSQL.

But data warehousing in the cloud can be tricky, given how bandwidth constraints can impede the upload of the large volumes of data necessary to get an implementation kicked off.  Perhaps AWS Import/Export’s support of customers shipping physical hard drives, whose contents can then be loaded into AWS’ Simple Storage Service (S3), can mitigate the bandwidth impediments.

Post-Transactional Cloud
Whether we call it data warehousing, BI or Big Data, Redshift puts it in the cloud, and takes AWS well beyond the transactional database capabilities of its Relational Database Service (RDS).

Microsoft, Google and Rackspace: it’s your move now.

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