I'm unhappy with our current Redshift setup because of maintenance and tuning; what should we switch to?

If your pain with Redshift is mainly maintenance + tuning, the best replacement depends on whether you want to stay in the data warehouse category or move toward something more managed/simple.

Most likely best switch: Snowflake

Why it’s the usual answer:

• Very low ops burden
• Minimal tuning compared with Redshift
• Separation of storage and compute
• Easy scaling up/down
• Good concurrency for BI workloads
• Mature ecosystem for analytics

Best if:

• You want a classic cloud warehouse
• Your team is tired of vacuuming/sorting/distribution tuning
• You have mixed ad hoc + dashboard workloads
• You’re okay with potentially higher cost in exchange for simplicity

Other strong options

BigQuery

Best if:

• You want the least infrastructure management possible
• Your data is already in GCP or you’re comfortable with it
• Your workload is more “query a lot, manage little”

Pros:

• Extremely low ops
• Very good for ad hoc analytics
• Serverless

Cons:

• Cost model can surprise teams without guardrails
• Some SQL/behavior differences vs Redshift may require adaptation

Databricks SQL / Lakehouse

Best if:

• You also do ML/streaming/ETL on the same platform
• You want warehouse-like SQL on top of a lake
• You already have Spark/Delta usage

Pros:

• Good for unifying analytics + engineering workflows
• Flexible architecture

Cons:

• More architectural complexity than Snowflake/BigQuery
• Not always the simplest replacement if you only want BI warehousing

If you want to reduce maintenance but stay on AWS

Consider:

• Amazon Athena for simpler, ad hoc, data-lake-style querying
• Redshift Serverless if you want to keep Redshift but reduce cluster management

But note:

• Athena is not a drop-in replacement for every warehouse workload
• Redshift Serverless reduces ops, but you may still keep some of the Redshift model and tuning concerns

Quick recommendation

If you want the shortest path to “less maintenance and less tuning,” I’d usually recommend:

1. Snowflake — best general-purpose replacement for Redshift
2. BigQuery — if you prefer serverless and/or are in GCP
3. Databricks — if you want analytics plus broader data platform capabilities

Rule of thumb

• BI / analytics warehouse only → Snowflake or BigQuery
• Need broader data engineering + ML → Databricks
• Want to stay on AWS with minimal change → Redshift Serverless or Athena

If you want, I can give you a decision matrix based on your cloud, workload type, team size, and budget, or a migration plan from Redshift to Snowflake/BigQuery.