User guide

What Is Amazon Redshift?
Welcome to the Amazon Redshift Cluster Management Guide. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed,
petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of
data and scale to a petabyte or more. This enables you to use your data to acquire new insights for your
business and customers.
The first step to create a data warehouse is to launch a set of nodes, called an Amazon Redshift cluster.
After you provision your cluster, you can upload your data set and then perform data analysis queries.
Regardless of the size of the data set, Amazon Redshift offers fast query performance using the same
SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications that you use today.
Are You a First-Time Amazon Redshift User?
If you are a first-time user of Amazon Redshift, we recommend that you begin by reading the following
sections:
• Amazon Redshift Management Overview (p. 2) – This topic provides an overview of Amazon Redshift.
• Service Highlights and Pricing – This product detail page provides the Amazon Redshift value proposition,
service highlights, and pricing.
• Amazon Redshift Getting Started – This guide walks you through the process of creating a cluster,
creating database tables, uploading data, and testing queries.
• Amazon Redshift Cluster Management Guide (this guide) – This guide shows you how to create and
manage Amazon Redshift clusters.
• Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide – If you are a database developer, this guide explains
how to design, build, query, and maintain the databases that make up your data warehouse.
There are several ways to manage clusters. If you prefer a more interactive way of managing clusters,
you can use the Amazon Redshift console or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). If you are
an application developer, you can use the Amazon Redshift Query API or the AWS Software Development
Kit (SDK) libraries to manage clusters programmatically. If you use the Amazon Redshift Query API, you
must authenticate every HTTP or HTTPS request to the API by signing it. For more information about
signing requests, go to Signing an HTTP Request (p. 131).
For information about the CLI, API, and SDKs, go to the following links:
• AWS Command Line Interface Reference
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Amazon Redshift Management Guide
Are You a First-Time Amazon Redshift User?