Open Access

Optimizing Cloud Data Warehouses for Enterprise Analytics: A Comprehensive Examination of Amazon Redshift Architectures and PRACTICES

4 Universidad de Chile, Chile

Abstract

The contemporary data-driven economy is defined by the convergence of high-velocity data generation, organizational demand for real-time analytics, and the increasing dominance of cloud-native data warehousing platforms. Within this environment, Amazon Redshift has emerged as a pivotal technological and organizational artifact that embodies both the technical evolution of massively parallel processing architectures and the epistemological transformation of how enterprises conceptualize analytical decision-making. This article develops an original, theory-grounded and empirically informed analysis of Amazon Redshift as a modern data warehousing paradigm, situating it within the historical lineage of storage systems, analytical infrastructures, and decision science. Drawing extensively on contemporary practitioner-oriented and scholarly literature, including the operationally rich recipes articulated by Worlikar, Patel, and Challa (2025), this study argues that Redshift represents not merely a scalable database but a socio-technical assemblage that reshapes how organizations produce, govern, and act upon knowledge.

The research is guided by a multi-layered methodological design that integrates conceptual analysis, literature synthesis, and interpretive evaluation of best-practice frameworks documented across both academic and industrial sources. Rather than reducing Redshift to its architectural components, the article interrogates how design choices around columnar storage, workload management, distributed query execution, and automated tuning translate into new organizational capabilities for data-driven reasoning. In doing so, the paper connects the technical affordances of Redshift with the broader intellectual traditions of database theory, artificial intelligence, and analytics-driven management. The findings demonstrate that Redshift’s performance, elasticity, and governance mechanisms function as enablers of what can be described as operational epistemology, whereby data becomes not only a record of the past but a continuously reconfigurable substrate for strategic foresight.

The contribution of this work lies in its integrative scope. By weaving together theoretical foundations from Ullman’s relational database principles, Russell and Norvig’s models of intelligent systems, and Davenport’s analytics-centric management theory with the concrete implementation strategies described in Redshift-focused literature, this article provides a comprehensive scholarly account of how cloud data warehouses mediate the relationship between technology and organizational intelligence. The implications extend beyond Amazon Redshift itself, offering a conceptual template for evaluating future data warehousing platforms as instruments of knowledge production in digitally transformed enterprises.

Keywords

References

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