What's the difference between Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift?
Both run SQL queries, but they're optimized for fundamentally different workloads. RDS handles transactional operations (inserts, updates, lookups) for your application. Redshift handles analytical queries (aggregations, scans, joins across billions of rows) for your data team.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon RDS
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Amazon Redshift
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Category
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Databases, Relational databases |
Databases, Analytics |
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Description
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Easy to manage relational databases optimized for total cost of ownership. Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and Db2. |
Cloud data warehouse that makes it fast and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL and existing BI tools. |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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On-Demand, Reserved, or Serverless |
On-Demand, Reserved, or Serverless |
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Free Tier
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Yes |
Yes — 2-month Redshift Serverless trial |
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Expert take
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RDS removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of database administration — patching, backups, failover — so your team can focus on schema design and query optimization instead of infrastructure. |
Redshift is purpose-built for analytics at scale. Columnar storage plus massively parallel processing means your BI queries that scan billions of rows complete in seconds, not hours. Redshift Serverless removes capacity planning entirely — you just run queries. |
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Customer story
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View product page
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How RDS and Redshift compare
Both Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift are fully managed with encryption at rest and in transit, IAM integration, automated backups, and VPC support. The features listed in the table above highlight where the services differ.
Choose RDS when your application needs to read and write individual records quickly (user logins, order placement, inventory updates). RDS is row-oriented and optimized for transactional workloads where you're touching one or a few rows at a time.
Choose Redshift when your data team needs to analyze large datasets (aggregations across millions of rows, historical trend analysis, BI dashboards). Redshift is column-oriented and optimized for scanning and aggregating massive tables.
Common pattern: Most organizations use both. RDS powers the application (OLTP), and data is periodically loaded into Redshift for analytics (OLAP). AWS Glue or DMS handles the data movement between them.
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