Redshift restoring from snapshot - what the cluster status really means about the cluster?

Everyday, my team shuts down the company redshift cluster, on evening, to save money.

We create a snapshot of that cluster to restore it on the next working day. When we restore the cluster, it takes some time to move from creating status to available, restoring status, however, what exactly available, restoring means? What kind of queries can I execute on my cluster when it stills restoring from snapshot?

I'm asking this because we have some queries to execute right after the creation of the cluster, and we are executing them on the available, restoring status. Should I wait until the restoring finishes?

Solution

From Amazon Redshift Snapshots:

When you restore from a snapshot, Amazon Redshift creates a new cluster and makes the new cluster available before all of the data is loaded, so you can begin querying the new cluster immediately. The cluster streams data on demand from the snapshot in response to active queries, then loads the remaining data in the background.

This is really neat, because it means you can start querying the data before it is fully loaded and Redshift will prioritize loading that data to fulfil your query!

Therefore, it would seem that:

Creating means the cluster is being created
Restoring means that the snapshot is being restored
Available means the restore is complete and the cluster is running