Amazon Web Services Inc. has announced the public preview of AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, with an aim to make it simpler for customers to find third-party data and query it using its data warehouse service.

The AWS Data Exchange debuted in 2019. The service is meant to help customers find, subscribe and use data from outside sources more easily. Prior to the launch of that service, subscribing to third-party data was a tricky business for most enterprises, involving lengthy negotiations over licensing agreements and the creation of application programming interfaces to access the information.

As for Amazon Redshift, it’s one of the company’s flagship products – a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service for companies to store all of their data in one place and then analyze it quickly and painlessly using Structured Query Language-based tools.

With Tuesday’s launch of AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, cloud customers can now combine their own data with the third-party datasets found in the AWS Data Exchange without needing to worry about the complex extract, transact and load processes that are normally involved in data integration. What’s more, customers can be sure they’re always accessing the most up-to-date versions of those datasets, since all queries are directed to the data provider’s own Amazon Redshift data warehouse.

As another benefit, entitlement, billing and payment management are fully automated too. So access to Amazon Redshift data is granted the moment a subscription begins, removed when it ends, invoices are generated automatically and payments collected at the customer’s regular billing time.

Customers can access more than 3,600 third-party datasets in the AWS Data Exchange catalog, with categories such as financial services, retail, location and marketing, public sector, healthcare, manufacturing and so on. This data can then be used to fuel applications that become far more powerful than those limited to a company’s own data.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said it’s good to see the long neglected, data-as-a-service segment getting some attention at last.

“It runs best in the cloud as that provides the infinite computing capabilities a next-generation DaaS needs,” Mueller said. “Marketplaces for data are key for enterprises to license and monetize data, so it’s good to see a player like AWS in the space giving it some traction.”

Amazon said AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift is available in preview in its US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland) and Europe (London) regions.

Registered data providers can learn how to license their datasets in Amazon Redshift here, and those who are not currently registered can learn how to do so here.

Image: Amazon