Enabling access to Amazon Redshift Spectrum - Amazon QuickSight
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Enabling access to Amazon Redshift Spectrum

Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, you can connect Amazon QuickSight to an external catalog with Amazon Redshift. For example, you can access the Amazon Athena catalog . You can then query unstructured data on your Amazon S3 data lake using an Amazon Redshift cluster instead of the Athena query engine.

You can also combine data sets that include data stored in Amazon Redshift and in S3. Then you can access them using the SQL syntax in Amazon Redshift.

After you've registered your data catalog (for Athena) or external schema (for a Hive metastore), you can use Amazon QuickSight to choose the external schema and Amazon Redshift Spectrum tables. This process works just as for any other Amazon Redshift tables in your cluster. You don't need to load or transform your data.

For more information on using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, see Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query external data in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.

To connect using Redshift Spectrum, do the following:

  • Create or identify an IAM role associated with the Amazon Redshift cluster.

  • Add the IAM policies AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess and AmazonAthenaFullAccess to the IAM role.

  • Register an external schema or data catalog for the tables that you plan to use.

Redshift Spectrum lets you separate storage from compute, so you can scale them separately. You only pay for the queries that you run.

To connect to Redshift Spectrum tables, you don't need to grant Amazon QuickSight access to Amazon S3 or Athena. Amazon QuickSight needs access only to the Amazon Redshift cluster. For full details on configuring Redshift Spectrum, see Getting started with Amazon Redshift Spectrum in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.