In January of 2014 I joined the AWS Premium Support organization as a database specialized engineer - to support our relational database services at that time (RDS and Redshift). I enjoyed the complexity and depth of supporting a quickly developing database technology with Redshift, so I quickly narrowed my focus and eventually supported Redshift customers 100% of my time.

I was functioning as the primary global Redshift escalation point for the support organization for just over a year before transitioning to the Redshift service team. Throughout this experience I identified several reoccurring converations I was having. Each topic on it’s own was quite simple, but when migrating to a young proprietary technology it wasn’t uncommon for a customer to encounter one or many of these issues in their implementation. Sometimes customers were aware, sometimes they were not, but when the issues were addressed performance always would improve.

To increase awareness of these topics, I collaborated with Ian Meyers, a UK based Solutions Architect, to put these reocurring conversations into writing. This was published in the AWS Big Data Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/top-10-performance-tuning-techniques-for-amazon-redshift/

Let me know what you think, and feel free to reach out with any feedback.