Dear AWS Big Data Blog
August 13, 2015 | Andy Granowitz

We love Redshift and we love R. So we were delighted to see an AWS post about how to connect Redshift to R. Petabytes of data plus all the statistical models you can imagine? I’m in!

Unfortunately, their recommended setup instructions are awfully cumbersome, in large part due to the 12 unfriendly steps required to connect SQL Workbench/J. In Wagon, connecting to Redshift is one step and requires no complex configuration: just copy and paste your connection details. Now, you’re ready to run those same Redshift queries in Wagon. SQL Workbench/J no longer needed.

While R offers an incredible collection of statistics and visualization libraries, it can often be more than you need for basic exploration and analysis. Also, many analysts find R to be overwhelming and unneeded for most their work. In fact, the data manipulation and visualization in the blog post of flight delays by month can be recreated in Wagon with one query and a quick drag and drop chart. You don’t need to be a command line wizard, just a little SQL curious!

Hopefully this post saves you time when you’re interacting with Redshift in R, or even if you are looking to run some more custom queries against your Redshift cluster. Sign up for early access to Wagon if you want try for yourself. Gogogo!

Oh! And, we’re working on a deep integration with R. If you have strong opinions about it, join us at band.wagonhq.com