Offloading data files from Amazon Redshift to Amazon S3 in Parquet format

Question

I would like to unload data files from Amazon Redshift to Amazon S3 in Apache Parquet format inorder to query the files on S3 using Redshift Spectrum. I have explored every where but I couldn't find anything about how to offload the files from Amazon Redshift to S3 using Parquet format. Is this feature not supported yet or was I not able to find any documentation about it. Could somebody who has worked on it share some light on this? Thank you.

Answer 1

Redshift Unload to Parquet file format is supported as of Dec 2019:

UNLOAD ('select-statement')
TO 's3://object-path/name-prefix'
FORMAT PARQUET

It is mentioned in Redshift Features

and also updated in Unload Document

with an example provided in the Unload Examples Document

Excerpt of the official documentation:

The following example unloads the LINEITEM table in Parquet format, partitioned by the l_shipdate column.

unload ('select * from lineitem')
to 's3://mybucket/lineitem/'
iam_role 'arn:aws:iam::0123456789012:role/MyRedshiftRole'
PARQUET
PARTITION BY (l_shipdate);

Assuming four slices, the resulting Parquet files are dynamically partitioned into various folders.

s3://mybucket/lineitem/l_shipdate=1992-01-02/0000_part_00.parquet
                                             0001_part_00.parquet
                                             0002_part_00.parquet
                                             0003_part_00.parquet
s3://mybucket/lineitem/l_shipdate=1992-01-03/0000_part_00.parquet
                                             0001_part_00.parquet
                                             0002_part_00.parquet
                                             0003_part_00.parquet
s3://mybucket/lineitem/l_shipdate=1992-01-04/0000_part_00.parquet
                                             0001_part_00.parquet
                                             0002_part_00.parquet
                                             0003_part_00.parquet