Chartio Performance Boost: 4x Faster Amazon Redshift Connections
Posted by on February 27, 2020 Chartio
As part of our commitment to continuously improve Chartio’s performance and reliability, we recently made an upgrade that should benefit all of our customers who use Amazon Redshift. In fact, some users have already seen performance improvements of nearly 3,000% thanks to this update.
Here’s what’s changing and why—and how it might impact you.
What’s changing?
The Amazon Redshift team has made a tremendous number of improvements over the past year, and Chartio has been quick to integrate these for the benefit of our many Redshift customers. That’s why, earlier this month, we upgraded the driver for our Amazon Redshift connection from version 1.2.10.1009, which we had been using since mid-2018, to the latest version, 1.2.36.1060.
Why did we do this?
The previous version of the Redshift driver had a few… quirks. For example, it would cause a noticeable lag in the time it took for Chartio to connect to Redshift. It also had a resource leak that forced us to periodically restart our servers, which was inefficient.
The new version addresses both of these issues, and is already resulting in noticeably faster Redshift connections for our customers:
Average Redshift connection durations before and after the February 13th, 2020 driver upgrade.
As the chart above illustrates, before the driver upgrade on February 13th, Chartio customers were regularly seeing lags of over 2 seconds for their Redshift connections to complete. Since the upgrade, that delay has dropped to roughly half a second per connection on average. In fact, at least one customer saw their average connection time drop from around 3 seconds per connection to 100 milliseconds following the upgrade.
How will this change impact me?
New Chartio customers will automatically be able to take advantage of the new driver when adding Redshift as a new data source in Chartio. Existing Chartio customers with Redshift connections enabled will also immediately enjoy the benefits of the new driver.
About Chartio and Amazon Redshift
Chartio is proud to offer our customers direct integration with Amazon Redshift, one of the most popular data warehouse solutions available today. We’ve had a long relationship with the Redshift team; Amazon recently recognized Chartio as Amazon Redshift Service Ready, certifying that Chartio successfully and reliably integrates with Redshift.
In addition to Amazon Redshift, Chartio offers direct integrations with dozens of popular data sources, including Heroku, Oracle, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, and Segment. You can even connect Chartio directly to your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, Google Sheets documents, and CSV files.
And thanks to our integration partners, Chartio offers SSH tunnelled connections to countless more services — like Salesforce, Github, Google Analytics, NetSuite, and Square.
Even more performance upgrades
This is just one of many performance improvements that Chartio has rolled out over the past several months (see the new Query Log, Smart Cache, Improved Dashboard Loading, Extended Cache Duration, Zero downtime deploys, etc), and the Redshift team has been releasing even more.
For more information about Chartio and Amazon’s many Redshift performance improvements, take a look at our new performance documentation, or sign up for a Performance Improvement session with one of our expert Data Advisors.
