How to connect Amazon Redshift to python

It appears that you wish to run Amazon Redshift queries from Python code.

The parameters you would want to use are:

  • dbname: This is the name of the database you entered in the Database name field when the cluster was created.
  • user: This is you entered in the Master user name field when the cluster was created.
  • password: This is you entered in the Master user password field when the cluster was created.
  • host: This is the Endpoint provided in the Redshift management console (without the port at the end): redshifttest-xyz.cooqucvshoum.us-west-2.redshift.amazonaws.com
  • port: 5439

For example:

con=psycopg2.connect("dbname=sales host=redshifttest-xyz.cooqucvshoum.us-west-2.redshift.amazonaws.com port=5439 user=master password=secret")

Old question but I just arrived here from Google.

The accepted answer doesn't work with SQLAlchemy, although it's powered by psycopg2:

sqlalchemy.exc.ArgumentError: Could not parse rfc1738 URL from string 'dbname=... host=... port=... user=... password=...'

What worked:

create_engine(f"postgresql://{REDSHIFT_USER}:{REDSHIFT_PASSWORD}@{REDSHIFT_HOST}:{REDSHIFT_PORT}/{REDSHIFT_DATABASE}")

Which works with psycopg2 directly too:

psycopg2.connect(f"postgresql://{REDSHIFT_USER}:{REDSHIFT_PASSWORD}@{REDSHIFT_HOST}:{REDSHIFT_PORT}/{REDSHIFT_DATABASE}")

Using the postgresql dialect works because Amazon Redshift is based on PostgreSQL.

Hope it can help other people!