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Comment by booleanbetrayal | Hacker News Reader

FDW is awesome and surprisingly useful. I really want Postgres 10's partitioning support to land in an AWS Redshift PG-reboot someday. Partitioning support is very manual and clunky in that old fork.

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As far as I know partitioning doesn’t exist at all in Redshift. However, Redshift has sort keys which work even better than partitions for the intended workload. Partitioning would be nice for retention but I’m not sure what additional benefits it brings on top of sorting for a DW workload.

Is there any talks by AWS engineers why they went with a fork and not say a white box implementation of CitusDB or just use EnterpriseDB or just make it a vanilla Postgres with some more performant defaults??

AWS acquired the underlying tech for Redshift from ParAccel. The former ParAccel CTO is actually on our team.

I wrote a long answer on Quora on that topic:

https://www.quora.com/Amazon-redshift-uses-Actians-ParaAccel...

Redshift is a massively parallel processing columnar storage database. The storage engine is completely different. Redshift is a derivative of ParAccel which was itself forked from Postgres and heavily modified. I assume AWS purchased it because it does things CitusDB and EnterpriseDB don’t do. The intended workloads are completely different.

Ahh. Consider me learned.

Good luck. If I remember correctly, Redshift forked off of Postgresql 7.4, so it would be a miracle if they could bring it up to modern postgresql standards.

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