Redshift Performance Optimization

Maximizing the performance capabilities of Redshift, while minimizing cost, can be a fine art form. Our senior Redshift consultants have extensive experience with performance audits on existing Redshift installations. We also perform regular audits on new Redshift builds to ensure we are providing the highest level of performance optimization for the customer. Some of our performance optimization services include:

• Optimization and performance tuning of the Redshift environment
• Auto WLM configuration with query priorities and query monitoring rules, so reporting queries are not starved by long-running loads
• Concurrency Scaling configuration for provisioned clusters, and base / max RPU tuning for Serverless workgroups, with usage limits as a cost guardrail
• Distribution and sort strategy review using Automatic Table Optimization recommendations (SVV_ALTER_TABLE_RECOMMENDATIONS)
• Query tuning and rewriting with Redshift best practices, including materialized views with automatic query rewrite and result caching
• Advanced data partitioning strategies for Spectrum and Iceberg external tables
• Implementation of incremental data updates to improve performance
• Data retirement practices: archiving cold data to S3 and querying it in place
• Enabling slow queries to perform up to 100x faster
• Cost-per-query monitoring using SYS_QUERY_HISTORY, the SYS monitoring views and CloudWatch, with dashboards and alarms handed over to your team
• Define and deploy monitoring, metrics and logging systems on AWS

For a self-serve starting point, read The 2026 Redshift Cost-Tuning Checklist.

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