What is Amazon Redshift Spectrum?

Amazon Redshift Spectrum is a powerful feature that allows users to query data stored in Amazon S3 directly from Amazon Redshift without having to load the data into the Redshift cluster itself. This capability provides significant flexibility and efficiency for organizations that handle large datasets, as it enables them to analyze vast amounts of data while minimizing the storage costs associated with moving that data into the database.

With Redshift Spectrum, users can create external tables that reference data in S3, allowing SQL queries to be executed on that external data seamlessly alongside data stored in Redshift. This facilitates a unified analysis across different data sources and helps organizations maximize the value of their big data investments without the overhead of managing separate data pipelines for storage and analytics.

The other options do not accurately reflect the functionality of Redshift Spectrum. Compressing data is related to storage efficiency rather than querying capabilities. Constructing machine learning models involves a different set of services, typically centered around SageMaker or other analytics tools rather than Redshift Spectrum. Though streaming data is an essential aspect of analytics workflows, Redshift Spectrum specifically serves the purpose of querying data in S3 and is not designed for real-time data streaming.