Amazon Redshift

This page describes how to create and maintain connections to your Amazon Redshift database.

Before you can write your transformed data to a table in Amazon Redshift, you should first establish a connection to your Amazon Redshift database.

Create a Redshift connection

Simple example

A Redshift connection can be created as simply as follows:

CREATE REDSHIFT CONNECTION redshift_connection
    CONNECTION_STRING = 'jdbc:redshift://<host_name>:5439/<database_name>'
    USER_NAME = 'your username'
    PASSWORD = 'your password';

Note that a Redshift connection must specify the database it is connecting to within the connection string. This means that in order to connect to multiple databases within your account, you need to create at least one connection per database.

Full example

The following example also creates a Redshift connection but additionally limits the maximum number of concurrent connections to your database by configuring an additional option MAX_CONCURRENT_CONNECTIONS:

CREATE REDSHIFT CONNECTION redshift_connection
    CONNECTION_STRING = 'jdbc:redshift://<host_name>:5439/<database_name>'
    USER_NAME = 'your username'
    PASSWORD = 'your password'
    MAX_CONCURRENT_CONNECTIONS = 10
    COMMENT = 'My new Redshift connection';

Alter a Redshift connection

Some connection options are considered mutable, meaning that in some cases, you can run a SQL command to alter an existing Redshift connection rather than creating a new one.

To change the database you are connecting to but keep everything else the same without having to create an entirely new connection, you can run the following command:

ALTER REDSHIFT CONNECTION my_redshift_connection
    SET CONNECTION_STRING = 'jdbc:redshift://<host_name>:5439/<database_name>';

Drop a Redshift connection

If you no longer need a connection, you can easily drop it with the following SQL command:

DROP CONNECTION my_redshift_connection; 

However, note that if there are existing tables or jobs that are dependent upon the connection in question, the connection cannot be deleted. Attempting to do so will raise the following error:

Cannot delete connection due to usages: <tables> <jobs>

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Learn More

To discover which connection options are mutable, and to learn more about the options, please see the SQL command reference for Amazon Redshift.