Nice post! We went through a very similar process back in Zalora (http://www.zalora.com) building our own Data Warehouse and Analytics function for over 300 internal users at the time.

Back when Redshift was on its initial beta release (2012), there almost wasn't any ETL / charts tool available for us, so we ended up building most of the tools and libraries ourselves. A few of them were open source too:

- https://github.com/zalora/redsift A web-interface SQL tool for Redshift, letting the user to query and also export them to S3 (and send an email alert to user once done.)

- https://github.com/zalora/postgresql-user-manager for managing user privileges

- https://github.com/lenguyenthedat/aws-redshift-to-rds for copying Tables from Redshift to RDS (postgresql)

- https://github.com/zalora/kraken a bit similar to luigi or airflow.

Things has changed quite a lot since then, there are a lot of great solutions to our problems that are either free or very cheap and production-ready:

- redash.io (https://github.com/EverythingMe/redash) - web-interface SQL tool with visualization - FREE

- redshift_console (https://github.com/EverythingMe/redshift_console) - redshift ops tool - FREE

- flydata (https://www.flydata.com/resources/flydata-sync/sync-rds-mysq...) sync live data from MySQL to Redshift - Subscription base

- dreamfactory (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00GXYDK18?sr=0-3&qid=...) for providing REST API interface to your database (supports redshift and other databases) - FREE

We didn't use Tableau in Zalora either (due to pricing and the number of users that we have in-house), and ended up building our own customized data dashboards with d3js and a few other different frameworks.

However, as long as you are ok with the price, Tableau is pretty good. It's being use widely in my current company (http://commercialize.tv) :

- You can minimize processing from Tableau server by just create another data mart layer from Redshift with your ETL tools / scripts, having Tableau connecting directly to it.

- Visualizations / Charts creation process is pretty much straightforward. The end-result will look exceptionally comparing to other solutions that we have tried.

- They also have a really good and active community.

user:	lenguyenthedat
created:	July 21, 2014
karma:	4