So let's say, hypothetically, you run an online store and you want to do some analytics over a proportion of your customer base. The Amazon solution here, with

So let's say, hypothetically, you run an online store and you want to do some analytics over a proportion of your customer base. The Amazon solution here, with the stuff they've launched today is; a) use Kinesis Firehose to take a stream of log events from your app and dump those into S3 (gives you decent-reliability replicated backups) b) ETL those using COPY into Amazon Redshift (a column store; very fast full-table scans) c) point QuickShot at Redshift to draw graphs so, yeah – but most of the data you want likely doesn't fit in Excel (or rather most of the work is reducing the data in size until it could).