

 This whitepaper is for historical reference only. Some content might be outdated and some links might not be available.

# Ideal usage patterns
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 Amazon Redshift is ideal for OLAP using your existing BI tools. Enterprises use Amazon Redshift to do the following: 
+  Running enterprise BI and reporting 
+  Analyze global sales data for multiple products 
+  Store historical stock trade data 
+  Analyze ad impressions and clicks 
+  Aggregate gaming data 
+  Analyze social trends 
+  Measure clinical quality, operation efficiency, and financial performance in health care 

 With the Amazon Redshift Spectrum feature, Amazon Redshift supports semi-structured data and extends your data warehouse to your data lake. This enables you to: 
+  Run as-needed analysis on large volume event data such as log analysis and social media 
+  Offload infrequently accessed history data out of the data warehouse 
+  Join the external dataset with the data warehouse directly without loading them into the data warehouse 