[1] It is built on top of technology from the massive parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse company ParAccel (later acquired by Actian),[2] to handle large scale data sets and database migrations.

Redshift differs from Amazon's other hosted database offering, Amazon RDS, in its ability to handle analytic workloads on big data data sets stored by a column-oriented DBMS principle.

Amazon has listed a number of business intelligence software proprietors as partners and tested tools in their "APN Partner" program,[8] including Actian, Actuate Corporation, Alteryx, Dundas Data Visualization, IBM Cognos, InetSoft, Infor, Logi Analytics, Looker, MicroStrategy, Pentaho,[9] Qlik, SiSense, Tableau Software, and Yellowfin.

Partner companies providing data integration tools include Informatica and SnapLogic.

System integration and consulting partners include Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini and DXC Technology.