Redshift is a data warehouse. It does not require indexes and handles wide tables--e.g., fact tables with lots of columns--very efficiently since it uses column storage. For data warehouse operations you can only substitute native PostgreSQL if the dataset is quite small.
Assuming you seek wire compatibility, your choice would therefore be a PostgreSQL-compliant DW, of which there are several. However, they have greatly differing cost and operational profiles, which make switching non-trivial. They also tend to support different versions of PG depending on when they forked from PostgreSQL.
Re:Amazon Aurora Backtrack
by scarface74 on Thursday May 10, 2018 @03:45PM
(#17042332)
Yes, if for some reason you want to leave RedShift, you will lose the benefits that Redshift provides and you will lose the speed. But you shouldn't have to change your program.
I'm not saying it is a good idea to leave Redshift in some distant future where you might save a few pennies. Heck, I hardly ever say it's a good idea to rearchitect a core part of your infrastructure without having a very good reason -- saving a few dollars isn't one. But from the software side, you aren't stuck with Redshift and you aren't embedding a lot of proprietary AWS specific drivers in your code base.
That's a bad example. Redshift is "wire compatible" with Postgres. You use the same drivers. There are a few popular extensions they added to Sql to copy files directly from and to S3 but that's about it.