S3 Table Buckets vs Redshift
AWS released S3 Table Buckets at re:Invent 2024, and at release they were pretty much only usable with Elastic Map Reduce. However, over the past year, the S3 Tables team has been making improvements. And while there are still some limitations, S3 Tables with Athena gives a user experience similar to traditional data warehouses such as Redshift.
Which leads to the question: can Athena and S3 Tables be a cost-effective replacement for Redshift? In this post I show how to use S3 Tables, and run some performance comparisons to answer that question.