Firebolt vs AWS Redshift: A Comprehensive Comparison of Firebolt AWS Features

In this article, you will learn about Firebolt which is a recent Data Warehouse solution with flexible modern technologies, and AWS Redshift.

A traditional Data Warehouse built by Amazon to cater to the early needs of Business Intelligence (BI) enterprises, showcasing their strength and highlighting their differences between Firebolt

Introduction to Firebolt

Firebolt is an Israeli-based company that regards itself as a modern cloud Data Warehouse of choice for Data Engineering and development teams and promises much more efficient, cheaper analytics of whatever is stored in it.

Introduction to AWS Redshift

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon saddled with the responsibility of providing a cloud computing platform and APIs to individuals, corporations, and enterprises.

Firebolt AWS Redshift Comparison: Key Differences

1) Architecture

• Firebolt: Firebolt has a decoupled storage and a compute architecture where it separates its computing process from its storage.
  • Its additional storage and query optimization give room for 10 times better performance and increased efficiency.
  • It supports AWS cloud infrastructure only and allows SQL to be run against external formats to support ingestion.
  • It has multi-tenant and isolated tenancy options for computing and storage and lets you choose an engine node type and any number of nodes for each cluster. 

• Redshift: Amazon Redshift does not separate its compute and storage operations. Redshift is designed with the shared-nothing Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture.
  • It is made up of Data Warehouse clusters with compute nodes that are split into different units but they all work together.
  • Client applications such as standard JDBC and ODBC drivers can communicate with the architectural system of Redshift and they can be integrated with most existing SQL client applications, BI tools, and Data Mining tools. 

2) Scalability

• Firebolt: Firebolt has benefits associated with architectures that separate their compute and storage operations as this improves efficient optimization and allows for the selection of nodes to form a cluster.
  • It also supports write scalability and continuous ingestion of data by users at any time as it has unlimited manual scaling, strong multi-master parallel batch processes with unlimited continuous updates.

• Redshift: Redshift can only support up to 50 queued queries to be run simultaneously in a cluster and can scale up to 10 clusters automatically in a concurrent query.
  • It also does its scaling both vertically and horizontally and does this automatically providing different clusters access to the same data while being used for different purposes, though it is best suited for batch ingestion and has a limited write throughput as it locks at the table level.

3) Performance

This difference has to do with indexing, query optimization performance, ingestion performance/latency, and semi-structured data performance.

• Firebolt: Firebolt separates its storage and compute therefore improving performance, scalability, and simplifies administration.
  • Firebolt’s indexes for data access, join, and aggregation greatly increases the performance level as performance gains range from 4-6000x across a wide range of queries.
  • This is made possible from Firebolt’s efficient storage F3 format and remote data access where only required data is fetched and not the entire partition.
  • Having the choice to choose the size and number of nodes for each cluster also greatly enhances the performance of Firebolt along with its native semi-structured data support and continuous, low latency ingestion.

• Redshift: Redshift delivers fast query speeds on large data sets dealing with sizes up to a petabyte and more as it provides a result cache for accelerating repetitive query workload making it efficient for running large amounts of queries.
  • Its ability to perform fast operations emanate from its design architecture of columnar data storage and Massively Parallel Processing because its storage and compute are not separated but carry out operations simultaneously.
  • Redshift can be quite slow when using semi-structured data or low-latency ingestion at any reasonable scale and it does not perform a lot of querying optimization and has no support for indexes. 

4) Pricing

This difference talks about computing and storage pricing, compute of instant types, and provision of additional nodes.

• Firebolt: Firebolt is easy to deploy and resize, add indexing, and change the instance type, therefore, providing on-demand and pre-purchasing pricing plans.
  • Since Firebolt’s storage and compute are separated, you can choose any node size or number of nodes to pay for making it cost-effective and thus it delivers a friendly business plan for most enterprises. Firebolt also supports ad hoc and semi-structured data analytics.

• Redshift: Redshift offers different pricing options such as on-demand pricing where charges can be set per hour.
  • It has a managed storage system depending on the instance type or the number of self-managed nodes where you can pay for the volume of data monthly making it costly overall for traditional reporting and dashboards. 

5) Firebolt AWS Redshift Comparison: Security

Security of a Data Warehouse is paramount to any operation to be carried out as this will go a long way in securing a corporation’s data.

• Firebolt: Firebolt’s architectural security network supports Firewall and WAF, SSL, PrivateLink whitelist/blacklist control, isolated tenancy option, etc.

• Redshift: Using Redshift, security is shared with AWS as the security of the cloud is taken care of by AWS. Redshift is also compliant with various security standards such as ISO, PCI, HIPAA BAA, and SOC 1, 2, 3. Redshift security network also supports Firewall and WAF, SSL, PrivateLink whitelist/blacklist control, isolated/VPC tenancy, etc.

6) Ease of Usage/Data Type

• Firebolt: Firebolt is simple to use as it is suited for reporting, creating colorful dashboards, interactive and operational purposes. It requires you to have solid SQL and Data Warehouse knowledge, and it supports JSON, XML, Avro, Parquet. 

• Redshift: Redshift requires you to have the background knowledge of PostgreSQL or similar RDBMS as its query engine is similar to them as it was originally designed to support traditional BI reporting. Redshift also supports JSON.

Conclusion

• This article focused on Data Warehousing and touched on the differences that exist between Firebolt and AWS Redshift.
• It also showed how the two Data Warehouses are structured and stated properties specific to each of them.