Insight: You Don't Know What Changed in Redshift

Insight: You Don't Know What Changed in Redshift

In Redshift, views break when something changes underneath them. But the problem isn’t just the view. It’s that Redshift doesn't tell you what changed.

There’s no built-in way to track dropped columns, renamed tables, altered types, or missing keys. And most teams don’t notice until a query fails. By then, it’s reactive. The damage is done.

We recently built a small script to scan every view in a Redshift system and check for breakage. It was simple and clear. But it raised a bigger question: What if you could know about a schema change before it broke something downstream?

That’s the deeper issue in Redshift environments: schema drift with no memory.

Redshift doesn’t give you a changelog. It doesn’t show you what disappeared, what type shifted, or what key was silently removed. And so slowly, quietly, views and queries drift out of sync with the world beneath them.

We’re exploring a second tool now—one that can capture a baseline of your Redshift schema, and then track changes over time. Not to prevent problems, but to shine a light on what’s moving. It’s not automation. It’s awareness.

Because if you knew what changed, you could stop guessing. And that’s where clarity begins.

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