The Informed Company

Foreword

In 2015, I used a product called Amazon Redshift. At the time, I had spent the prior 15 years of my career in a variety of roles all centered around their use of data, from analytics to marketing to operations. And while I considered my data competency my biggest professional differentiator, I had also become deeply frustrated. For all of the supposed progress in the data ecosystem, it was still slow, hard, and expensive to get insights out of data.

But my first experience with Redshift is where that all changed for me. I have such a visceral memory of the first hour I spent with the product: queries I ran returned so fast that it seemed like absolute magic. I had spent years and years of my career writing queries and waiting for the MacOS “spinner” icon to stop spinning. Now, all the sudden, these same queries weren’t 20% faster…they were 10 to 100 to 1000x faster. I felt like I had superpowers.

I'll let Dave and Matt actually explain how the modern data warehouse can achieve these types of performance results, but for now, just trust me that it can and does. Given that, the fascinating question is actually: what does this mean for people like you and me?

What kind of “people” do I mean? You know—people who are involved in making decisions at companies and want to use data to help us. People who likely over the years have acquired a variety of data skills, whether that's Excel VLOOKUPs, Google Analytics dashboards, SQL, or any of a thousand other options. People who ...