The Amazon Redshift COPY command is the recommended way of moving data into Amazon Redshift. The COPY command takes advantage of the parallel architecture in Amazon Redshift to move data. The COPY command can read files from various sources, including EMR, DynamoDB, and remote hosts via SSH.
Compressing files in S3 when loading large amounts of data will accomplish three goals:
- Faster file upload to S3
- Lower S3 storage utilization (cost)
- Faster load process since uncompression un-compression can happen as files are read.
Long-running COPY commands will see the most improvement.