Loading data into Amazon Redshift

Question

How to load data into Amazon Redshift? I went through the documentation but the info given there is very overwhelming, so a simple explanation would suffice.

Answer 1

You can load data into Amazon Redshift from a range of data sources including Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR and or any SSH-enabled host on Amazon EC2 or on-premises. Amazon Redshift attempts to load your data in parallel into each compute node to maximize the rate at which you can ingest data into your data warehouse cluster.

You can connect to Amazon Redshift using ODBC or JDBC and issue 'insert' SQL commands to insert the data. But this is slower than using S3 or DynamoDB since those methods load data in parallel to each compute node while SQL insert statements load via the single leader node.