Amazon fluffs up cloudy data warehousing service with Redshift • The Register

More Redshift details and speculation

"The fact that Jassy's presentation says that the Redshift service also uses PostgreSQL drives to link to third party BI tools would seem to indicate that Amazon has parallelized the open source PostgreSQL database, much as EMC's Greenplum and IBM's Netezza have done for their data warehousing appliances.
While the base open source PostgreSQL database does not support columnar storage, Yahoo! whipped up a columnar variant of PostgreSQL and out it into production more than five years ago, and if Yahoo! can do it, Amazon can, too."

Amazon fluffs up cloudy data warehousing service with Redshift • The Register