Redshift vs. Firebolt ii

REDSHIFT VS. FIREBOLT

For sub-second, high concurrency analytics

Low latency and high concurrency. Deliver lightning fast queries and high concurrency with optimized storage, scalable compute and specialized indexes.

Cost efficiency. Get better performance using a fraction of the compute resources.

SQL simplicity. Deliver high performance with the simplicity of ANSI-SQL.

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Firebolt Performance Advantage

Data platform provider Explorium’s evaluation demonstrated that Firebolt delivers 15-50x faster query response times for their workloads compared to Redshift.

Amazon redshift firebolt comparison table

Disclaimer - This is not a global benchmark. The results are based on real world queries and run-times as reported by our users over Redshift, and their equivalent run-times over the same data in Firebolt after tuning and optimization.

Sub-second performance on TBs

Granular elasticity

Firebolt’s cost-based query optimizer turns any SQL into its most performant version, taking into account factors like index utilization, JOIN strategies, and data distribution.

Sparse indexing

Firebolt scans, filters, and analyzes data using specialized indexes. The sparse index allows queries to pick up highly granular data ranges without having to scan entire partitions.

JOIN acceleration

Advanced history-based query optimization and JOIN acceleration for extremely fast and cost-efficient JOINs.

Aggregate indexes

Precomputed versions of your data maintained by Firebolt from the base table are leveraged to accelerate queries with aggregate functions.

Firebolt

Redshift

Performance

Efficient sub-second performance

Acceptable performance for consistent workloads

Scalability

Dynamic, fine-tuned scaling

Hard to scale

Cost

Consistently best price/performance

Predictable but often expensive

Flexibility & Ease of Use

High flexibility and control

Easy to use but hard to maintain

Use cases

Latency-sensitive dashboards and data apps

Predictable deployments on hot structured data

Firebolt

Efficient sub-second performance

Specialized indexes provide order of magnitude performance improvement
Optimized granular data access and JOINs
Fast semi-structured performance

Redshift

Acceptable performance for consistent workloads

Heavily dependent on output caching - making it good for repeat queries but not for diverse queries
Limited query optimization
Performance issues at scale and concurrency
Slow on semi-structured data

Firebolt

Dynamic, fine-tuned scaling

Instantly scale storage and compute independently
Granular scale-up and scale-out options
Concurrency easily expandable by adding engines
Write scalability (no partition rewrites for each write)

Redshift

Hard to scale

Compute and storage must scale together
Can't separate workloads, must scale the whole cluster
Scaling a cluster takes 15-60 minutes, and causes rebalancing which degrades performance
Max 50 concurrent queries across clusters

Firebolt

Consistently best price/performance

Pay per use
Granular configuration options eliminate over-provisioning
Simple transparent pricing
Strong provisioning administration keeps costs in check

Redshift

Predictable but often expensive

Pay for a pre-defined cluster of compute and storage, whether or not it's in use
Since workloads can't be isolated, cost is determined by peak usage
Best for predictable workloads and long-term contracts

Firebolt

High flexibility and control

Best workload isolation and segmentation
Can provision different cluster types on same data
No need to refactor schema because of JOIN efficiency

Redshift

Easy to use but hard to maintain

No workload isolation
Requires substantial manual maintenance
Can't provision different cluster types on same data

Firebolt

Latency-sensitive dashboards and data apps

Redshift

Predictable deployments on hot structured data

What developers say

400x

Faster query performance

“Firebolt is a massive improvement. On a dataset of 100 million records, Redshift took minutes, Firebolt analyzed in seconds.”

AdTech

5x

Lower costs

"With Firebolt, our 1000 Looker users can now run any analytics against billions of rows and terabytes of data, in seconds or less."

AdTech

10x

Faster ELT

“Switching to Firebolt has enabled us to expand our enterprise-class clients and apply our solution to new market opportunities where the data volumes are much higher than our traditional customers.”