---
title: "Amazon Redshift"
description: "Amazon Redshift is AWS's cloud data warehouse, using massively parallel processing (MPP) to run analytical SQL over large datasets, available as provisioned clusters or serverless."
canonical: "https://motherduck.com/glossary/amazon-redshift/"
related:
  - title: "DuckLake Architecture Deep Dive"
    url: "https://motherduck.com/blog/ducklake-architecture-deep-dive/"
  - title: "Amazon Q Developer + MotherDuck Integration | DuckDB Analytics"
    url: "https://motherduck.com/ecosystem/amazon-q-developer/"
  - title: "Together AI: Scaling a Data Platform while Scaling the Company"
    url: "https://motherduck.com/case-studies/together-ai-scaling-with-motherduck/"
gated_asset:
  title: "DuckLake on MotherDuck"
  url: "https://motherduck.com/product/ducklake/"
---

# Amazon Redshift

> Amazon Redshift is AWS's cloud data warehouse, using massively parallel processing (MPP) to run analytical SQL over large datasets, available as provisioned clusters or serverless.

## Overview

Amazon Redshift is a cloud data warehouse from AWS, built for analytical (OLAP) SQL workloads over large datasets. It uses a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture: data is distributed across nodes, and queries run in parallel across them. Redshift's MPP engine has roots in ParAccel technology, and its SQL front-end is derived from PostgreSQL, so its dialect and client connectivity are largely PostgreSQL-compatible even though the storage and execution engine are proprietary and columnar.

## Deployment options

Redshift can run in two ways:

- **Provisioned clusters** — you choose node types and cluster size, giving direct control over compute.
- **Redshift Serverless** — capacity is allocated automatically, so you run queries without managing a cluster.

Related features include Redshift Spectrum for querying data in Amazon S3 without loading it first.

## Redshift and DuckDB

Redshift is a distributed, managed warehouse designed to scale across many nodes inside AWS. DuckDB is an open-source, single-node, in-process OLAP engine, with MotherDuck as its serverless cloud version. For many analytical workloads that fit on one machine, DuckDB delivers strong columnar performance without cluster management; Redshift is aimed at centralized, elastically scaled cloud warehousing. Because Redshift exports to S3 and speaks SQL, DuckDB is often used alongside it for local development or ad-hoc file querying:

```sql
-- DuckDB querying Redshift UNLOAD output in S3
SELECT customer_id, SUM(amount) AS total
FROM read_parquet('s3://warehouse/unload/orders/*.parquet')
GROUP BY ALL
ORDER BY total DESC
LIMIT 10;
```

A comparable Redshift query, using its PostgreSQL-style dialect:

```sql
SELECT customer_id, SUM(amount) AS total
FROM orders
GROUP BY customer_id
ORDER BY total DESC
LIMIT 10;
```