Amazon Redshift materialized views support external tables

Posted on: Jun 19, 2020

Amazon Redshift adds materialized view support for external tables. With this enhancement, you can create materialized views in Amazon Redshift that reference external data sources such as Amazon S3 via Spectrum, or data in Aurora or RDS PostgreSQL via federated queries.  

Materialized views can significantly boost query performance for repeated and predictable analytical workloads such as dashboarding, queries from business intelligence (BI) tools, and ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) data processing. Data engineers can easily create and maintain efficient data processing pipelines with materialized views while seamlessly extending the performance benefits to data analysts and BI tools.

Now you can extend the benefits of materialized views to external data in your S3 data lake and federated data sources. Using materialized views, you can easily store and manage the pre-computed results of a SELECT statement referencing both external tables and Redshift tables. Subsequent queries referencing the materialized views run much faster as they use the pre-computed results stored in Amazon Redshift, instead of accessing the external tables. This also helps you reduce associated costs of repeatedly accessing the external data sources, because they are accessed only when you explicitly refresh the materialized views. 

To get started and learn more, visit the documentation. Refer to the AWS Region Table for Amazon Redshift availability.