Hands-on – deploying a Redshift Serverless cluster and running Redshift Spectrum queries

In our Redshift hands-on exercise, we’re going to create a new Redshift Serverless cluster and configure Redshift Spectrum so that we can query data in external tables on Amazon S3. We’ll then use both Redshift Spectrum and Amazon Athena to query data in S3.

Uploading our sample data to Amazon S3

For this exercise, we are going to use some data generated with a service called Mockaroo (https://www.mockaroo.com/). This service enables us to generate fake data with a wide variety of field types and is useful for demos and testing.

We will upload this dataset, containing a list of users, to Amazon S3 and then query it using Redshift Spectrum. Note that all data in this file is fake data, generated with the tool mentioned above. Therefore, the names, email addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, etc. in this dataset are not real.

Let’s get started...