Data in the Cloud -- Announcing our new Amazon Redshift Connector

Happy new year everyone! After an exciting 2012, this year is shaping up to have many exciting new data connectivity options for Tableau. I'm particularly excited to let you know about a new connector we've been working on for Amazon Redshift - Amazon's new petabyte-scale data warehouse service that runs in Amazon's cloud.

Over the last several years, Cloud and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) adoption has been increasing. Why? There are a number of reasons, including smaller start-up costs, faster implementation time, reduced administration overhead, increased scalability and reliability, and flexible pricing models. Amazon Redshift is designed for developers or businesses that require the full features and capabilities of a relational data warehouse. It offers fast query performance when analyzing virtually any size data sets, from hundreds of gigabytes to a petabyte or more. It’s easily scalable, inexpensive and manages all the details of monitoring, backups, patching, and securing the data warehouse.

The Amazon Redshift connector makes it easy for any business user to connect to their data in minutes. The connector makes use of the Postgres ODBC driver and SQL to communicate with Redshift. It provides live, interactive and secure access to the data stored in Amazon Redshift without the requirement to extract the data or write complex SQL statements. Once connected, users will get an easy-to-use, fast and interactive experience on massive volumes of data.

The connector will be generally available in an upcoming maintenance release of Tableau 7.0 and one of the first maintenance releases for Tableau 8.0.

Customers interested in trying out a preview version of the Redshift connector should contact their Tableau account manager. For more information about Redshift, I encourage you to visit the Amazon Redshift Website.

As always, we'd love to get your feedback,

Ted