Amazon Redshift introduces Automatic Table Sort, an automated alternative to Vacuum Sort

Amazon Redshift now provides an efficient and automated way to maintain sort order of the data in Redshift tables to continuously optimize query performance. The new automatic table sort capability offers simplified maintenance and ease of use without compromising performance and access to Redshift tables. Automatic table sort complements Automatic Vacuum Delete and Automatic Analyze and together these capabilities fully automate table maintenance. Automatic table sort is now enabled by default on Redshift tables where a sort key is specified.

With Redshift automatic table sort, an administrator no longer needs to worry about tracking what to sort and when to sort. Redshift does it automatically. Redshift runs the sorting in the background and re-organizes the data in tables to maintain sort order and provide optimal performance. This operation does not interrupt query processing and reduces the compute resources required by operating only on frequently accessed blocks of data. It prioritizes which blocks of table to sort by analyzing query patterns using machine learning. Automatic table sort is most useful for use cases with continuous ingestion of data and ETL/Batch processing operations such as incremental daily updates. Redshift will provide a recommendation if there is a benefit to explicitly run vacuum sort on a given table.

For more information about automatic table sort, refer to the Amazon Redshift documentation.

This feature is available in Redshift 1.0.11118 and later. Refer to the AWS Region Table for Amazon Redshift availability.