Posted On: Nov 11, 2016

We are excited to announce four new Amazon Redshift features that improve data compression, connection management, and data loading. 

Estimate storage space savings with compression: The ANALYZE COMPRESSION command now provides an estimate of storage space reduction for each suggested column encoding so that you can easily choose the best compression option. 

Automatic compression: When you create tables using the CREATE TABLE AS command, Amazon Redshift automatically compresses all columns except for sort key columns and the ones with boolean, real, and double precision types. Amazon Redshift uses the LZO encoding as the default for automatic compression. This feature reduces storage space for your clusters and saves costs. 

Connection limits for users and databases: You can now control the number of database connections a user can open concurrently and the number of concurrent connections that can be made to a database. You can use the CONNECTION LIMIT parameter when creating a user, creating a database, altering a user or altering a database to impose connection limits.

Data loading improvement: When you use the COPY command for tables with a single sort key column, and insert data in sort key order, the command automatically adds new rows to the table's sorted region. This reduces or even eliminates the need to vacuum.