Amazon Redshift Troubleshooting

Connecting to a Redshift Database

Problems sometimes arise when attempting to connect to a Redshift database. This is almost always due to a misconfiguration in the user’s environment.

The following suggestions can often help detect and overcome such problems.

  • Ensure you can connect to the database with the host, port, database, username, and password using psql. See Redshift documentation for proper security and connection information, and for the usage of the psql utility.
  • In most cases, the REDSHIFT_DATABASE keyword should be left with blank values, with the REDSHIFT_DATASET keyword containing the name of the Redshift database.
  • When using a UNIX operating system, the environment variables PGHOST, PGPORT, PGDATABASE, PGUSER and PGPASSWORD can be used to specify the Redshift connection parameters.
  • If the table list in the Redshift Reader Parameters does not display your table, try typing the name with the schema prefix (for example, public.mytable). If this works, then your search path for schemas may not be set to the desired values.