Amazon Redshift and PostgreSQL

Amazon Redshift is based on PostgreSQL. Amazon Redshift and PostgreSQL have a number of very important differences that you must be aware of as you design and develop your data warehouse applications.

Amazon Redshift is specifically designed for online analytic processing (OLAP) and business intelligence (BI) applications, which require complex queries against large datasets. Because it addresses very different requirements, the specialized data storage schema and query execution engine that Amazon Redshift uses are completely different from the PostgreSQL implementation. For example, where online transaction processing (OLTP) applications typically store data in rows, Amazon Redshift stores data in columns, using specialized data compression encodings for optimum memory usage and disk I/O. Some PostgreSQL features that are suited to smaller-scale OLTP processing, such as secondary indexes and efficient single-row data manipulation operations, have been omitted to improve performance.

See Amazon Redshift architecture for a detailed explanation of the Amazon Redshift data warehouse system architecture.

PostgreSQL 9.x includes some features that are not supported in Amazon Redshift. In addition, there are important differences between Amazon Redshift SQL and PostgreSQL that you must be aware of. This section highlights the differences between Amazon Redshift and PostgreSQL and provides guidance for developing a data warehouse that takes full advantage of the Amazon Redshift SQL implementation.