AQUA is a solution to the problem that min-max culling (aka the Zone Map) is wholly ineffective when searching for strings with wildcard patterns, forcing full column scans, and as such all scan steps and only all scan steps which use the LIKE and/or SIMILAR TO operators are routed to AQUA, as these are the two operators offering search in strings with wildcards. AQUA is implemented as a multi-node distributed set of independent data processors, separate from RMS and from Redshift, and as such the basic design is the same as Redshift Spectrum, with each processor scanning a portion of the data in a table and returning results to the Redshift cluster, and appears to implement most if not all of the SQL functionality possible with this design, which is to say, that functionality which can be performed by examining a single row at a time in a single table, and by maintaining aggregate information from those rows; so there exists functionality which AQUA cannot implement, such as distinct. When AQUA is presented with a scan step with work AQUA cannot perform, necessarily some, most or all of the rows in the table must be returned to the Redshift cluster, such that that work can there be performed. As such, queries must be written correctly for AQUA, just as with Spectrum. AWS do not provide the information to do this, and so guesswork and experimentation must be used. When a scan step is routed to AQUA, AQUA downloads to itself, not to the Redshift cluster local SSD cache, the table being scanned from RMS. With the 12,988 block test table, on an idle two node ra3.xlplus cluster, this took 41 seconds. After this, AQUA performs more quickly than the cluster, with the time taken with test queries used for the part of the work routed to AQUA going from about 9.4 seconds to about 1.7 seconds. It is necessary then to issue a number of LIKE or SIMILAR TO queries on a table to reclaim the large initial cost of the first query, otherwise AQUA will actually reduce performance. There are no findings about how long must pass before a table needs to be re-read by AQUA. In the course of investigating AQUA, it was discovered that RMS is a block-based store, not a table-based store; Redshift brings into local SSD cache only those blocks which are needed to service queries. With an ra3.xlplus node, bandwidth to RMS is about 160mb/second, and bandwidth to the local SSD cache is about 720mb/second.