Access S3 Data with Redshift Spectrum

Discover how to analyze S3 data effortlessly using Redshift Spectrum. Learn to connect and leverage live datasets without data duplication.

Easily analyze Parquet or CSV files stored in Amazon S3 using Redshift Spectrum—no data movement required. Tellius supports importing external tables from Redshift Spectrum as live datasets. Once your data is registered as an external table in Redshift, you can browse, query, and analyze it in Tellius just like any native Redshift object. This integration lets you unlock insights from S3 with minimal setup—without duplicating or moving files, and with cost-efficient scans where you only pay for the data actually read.

To get started, prepare your external tables in AWS, then connect Redshift to Tellius and begin live querying.

Prerequisite: Prepare external table in Redshift Spectrum

Before using this data in Tellius, follow the official AWS instructions to:

1. Create an IAM role for Redshift

2. Attach the IAM role to your Redshift cluster

3. Format and upload your data to S3 (CSV or Parquet recommended)

4. Create an external schema and table in Redshift using Redshift Spectrum

5. Verify the table by querying from Redshift directly

Connecting Redshift to Tellius

Once your external table is created and verified:

1. In Tellius, navigate to Data → Connect → Add new datasource → Amazon Redshift.

2. For connecting to Redshift, check out this page.

Amazon Redshift

1. Either select from the list of available tables or use Custom SQL section to preview and import the required table(s).

Custom SQL section

1. When importing the tables, make sure to select Live connection checkbox.

Live connection

1. The imported table can be found under Data → Datasets. You can now begin creating Business Views using this external table—just like any other dataset in Tellius and your queries will run live against Redshift Spectrum.