Amazon Redshift Update Aims to Improve Data Warehouse Ease of Use

JSON support. Barr wrote that Redshift customers can now load data in JSON format directly into Redshift without the need to do any preprocessing. A variety of devices, event handling systems, servers and games generate data in the format.

The ability to copy from Elastic MapReduce. Customers can now copy data from an Elastic MapReduce cluster to a Redshift cluster. It requires customers to first transfer their Redshift cluster's public key and the IP addresses of the cluster nodes to the EC2 hosts in the Elastic MapReduce cluster, but then Barr suggested it's easy to copy from one to the other.

Customers can now unload to a single file.

Increased concurrency. Barr noted that customers can now configure a maximum of 50 simultaneous queries across all of their queues. Each slot in the queue is allocated an equal, fixed share of the server memory allocated to the queue.

It's now possible to configure the cursor counts and result set sizes. Barr wrote that larger values will result in increased memory consumption, but the change should be of interest to are also using data visualization and analytical products from Tableau.

Regular expression extraction. The new REGEX_SUBSTR function extracts a substring from a string, as specified by a regular expression.

Amazon Redshift has also gained FedRAMP approval, giving Amazon and its partners the ability to take the cloud-based data warehousing option to federal government agencies and departments. That could present a lucrative market for Amazon Web Services and its various partners.

Support for ECDHE-RSA and ECDHE-ESDCSA cipher suites. Customers can now use SSL connections to Redshift and choose between the two ECDHE protocols and their associated cipher suites.

Amazon also launched a service for monitoring the progress of cluster resize operations.