AWS Redshift Useful Commands

This is basically for me but should anyone else find them useful, here is a set of commands I find useful in AWS Redshift.

I am going to keep adding as I run into them.

Show all Tables 

SELECT DISTINCT tablename
FROM pg_table_def
WHERE schemaname = 'public'
ORDER BY tablename;

Describe a table 

desc <<TABLENAME>>; i.e desc mytablename;

Passing AWS Certifications

I took two AWS certifications last year, the Developer and the Solutions Architect both at Associate level.

I basically took them because I wanted to make sure I rounded out my AWS experience, I had been working in AWS for about 2 years already.

A couple of things I learnt in the process that I wanted to share.

1) If you have worked in AWS for a year or more try the practice exams first is a good way to gauge what you are missing and gives you an idea of the standard. I was for some reason really worried about taking them and failing it. But I was so glad I did it, it made such a huge difference when I went onto study for them seriously, it just gave me the insight I needed to understand the detail of learning needed.

2) Online resources are easily the best place to learn the information you need to pass the exams.

I cannot tell you how much A Cloud Guru made a difference in terms of getting my head around the areas that I had never touched in my day to day experience with AWS.

3) FAQs are the way forward. I would suggest giving the FAQs a full read over to supplement any online training that you do. Any service that comes up in the exam read the FAQ for it.

4) A Cloud Guru make a test IOS app to help you get into the swing of answering multiple choice questions. See the link here : Exam Guru: AWS Solution Architect - Associate I noticed today it has not been updated since 2015 . ;( Back last year I found questions that were out of date, so be warned.

Please see the message from A Cloud Guru : Which is great news:
"The questions are constantly updated to keep in-sync with our online quizzes. While the app content is always updated, the app itself (the skin) hasn't been updated which is why the date is still listed as 2015. Apple only updates the date when enhancements are made, not when content is updated."

Apologies A Cloud Guru. Thanks for putting me straight. Great to hear also. ;)

What I also did like about it though was it just got me into the practice of multiple choice and remembering to read the full question before pressing A or B. ;)  It was great for train journeys and building a bit of confidence.

5) AWS Conference events. If you can make it to any of the conference events AWS run then they normally have a certification and training team there. It is a great place to go and ask direct questions about what stuff will be in the exam, especially about new stuff  AWS had just introduced.

6) Make sure you do the training multiple choices that AWS give out as a feel of the exam. Some of the questions asked can be very close in to the real test. Make sure you research and nail out those answers. They don't give you the answers but you can find them online with a bit of Google magic.

7) If you have a Kindle download all the books that AWS publish for free on the services.  I read loads of them and they are generally well written and short enough for you not to get to lost in. Reading the best practices books really helped me and I would say is recommended.

Being certified made a huge difference in me understand AWS working and also opened my eyes to services that I did not know existed.  I would encourage anyone who works with AWS to study for the exams, it forces you learn the limits of AWS and best practices.

The problem I am trying to solve : A new hope for snails.

So I am trying to work on a process of identifying snails in a picture.

Why am I trying to do this? I want to create an alert when a Snail appears on my plants so I can go out and remove it before it eats all the leaves.. No seriously, I know I could be solving bigger issues but this seemed like a good place to start.

But I don't want to use pesticides in my garden and I have great patch at the back of the garden that the snails can happily eat so I spend some time picking up snails and relocating them to this home...Yes I know that is slight madness..

So I took some pictures of a snail in locations and some without in my gardening they look roughly like this:

So ideally my program would give me a tag of snail .

So before I decided to use anything else I looked at third party solutions, I decided I would try some programs that were already out there. Why build when maybe someone has already nailed the snail issue.

Quick Google: Image recognition

AWS Rekognition
Results from AWS Rekonition:   https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/


Very impressive, but no snail, I was though super impressed.


clarifai https://www.clarifai.com/



Again these are very impressive, when you consider the picture I sent, but still no snail.

Google Vision  https://cloud.google.com/vision/



So like any solid person I stopped there...Yeah I know.. Well to be honest I wanted to try and solve this problem with Tensorflow https://www.tensorflow.org/ and try Meta Mind https://metamind.io/ .

If I was in some sort of production world I would have probably looked at greater depth for other solutions.

I would encourage anyone to try these services and I will probably run basic a blog on how to get started with all three in the future.  But if anyone has any further suggestions for services to try I am happy to give them a go and post here.

So this is the problem I am trying to solve.