The original codebase came from ParAccel which itself was later acquired by Actian, but Redshift is definitely owned and developed by Amazon.
But yes, the changes are not viable to upstream without so many modifications that fundamentally change the database. Pluggable storage in mainline would be a good first step.
I'm the guy who wrote the reply that pops up first when you read that Quora thread.
Here's the short story (and I know all of this because the guy who invented the core engine for ParAccel's MPP columnar tech, that is the foundation for Redshift, is one of our early advisors).
- ParAccel developed the tech for a columnar storage database. I believe it was called "matrix"
- Amazon AWS bought the source code from ParAccel, limited for use as a cloud service, i.e. they couldn't create another on-premise version that would compete with ParAccel
- ParAccel then sold to Actian, and a few years ago Actian shelved the product as clearly the on-premise world had lost to cloud warehouses.
The reason AWS bought the source code was time-to-market. It would have taken too long to build a product from scratch, and customers were asking for a cloud warehouse. Back then, ParAccel had by far the best and fastest MPP / columnar tech, plus it's very attractive since it's based on Postgres.
So Actian and Amazon AWS essentially had the same tech, just different distribution models. One is on-premise (Actian), the other one a managed cloud service (AWS). We all know who won.
there's very interesting paper by the Amazon RDS team (where Redshift rolls up). It's not only about "faster, better, cheaper" - it really is about simplicity and that's what Redshift delivered on.
Spin up a cluster in less than 5 minutes and get results within 15 min. Keep in mind, this was all in late 2012, so what appears "normal" today was pure magic back then.
but ever since the "fork", i.e. when AWS purchased a snapshot in time of the code base, the products have obviously diverged. There's some 8 years of development now in Amazon Redshift.
But yes, the changes are not viable to upstream without so many modifications that fundamentally change the database. Pluggable storage in mainline would be a good first step.