Renaming clusters

You can rename a cluster if you want the cluster to use a different name. Because the endpoint to your cluster includes the cluster name (also referred to as the cluster identifier), the endpoint changes to use the new name after the rename finishes. For example, if you have a cluster named examplecluster and rename it to newcluster, the endpoint changes to use the newcluster identifier. Any applications that connect to the cluster must be updated with the new endpoint.

You may rename a cluster if you want to change the cluster your applications connect to without having to change the endpoint in those applications. In this case, you must first rename the original cluster and then change the second cluster to reuse the name of the original cluster before the rename. Doing this is necessary because the cluster identifier must be unique within your account and region, so the original cluster and second cluster cannot have the same name. You might do this if you restore a cluster from a snapshot and don't want to change the connection properties of any dependent applications.

When you rename a cluster, the cluster status changes to renaming until the process finishes. The old DNS name that was used by the cluster is immediately deleted, although it could remain cached for a few minutes. The new DNS name for the renamed cluster becomes effective within about 10 minutes. The renamed cluster is not available until the new name becomes effective. The cluster will be rebooted and any existing connections to the cluster will be dropped. After this completes, the endpoint will change to use the new name. For this reason, you should stop queries from running before you start the rename and restart them after the rename finishes.

Cluster snapshots are retained, and all snapshots associated with a cluster remain associated with that cluster after it is renamed. For example, suppose that you have a cluster that serves your production database and the cluster has several snapshots. If you rename the cluster and then replace it in the production environment with a snapshot, the cluster that you renamed still has those existing snapshots associated with it.

Amazon CloudWatch alarms and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) event notifications are associated with the name of the cluster. If you rename the cluster, you must update these accordingly. You can update the CloudWatch alarms in the CloudWatch console, and you can update the Amazon SNS event notifications in the Amazon Redshift console on the Events pane. The load and query data for the cluster continues to display data from before the rename and after the rename. However, performance data is reset after the rename process finishes.

For more information, see Modifying a cluster.