View the original community article here
Last tested: March 2021
MD5 is just a hash that turns strings into hashes.
It's useful for making IDs out of a concatenation of several fields, which makes it valuable for joins. Looker uses it in symmetric aggregates.
Example:
select md5('Amazon Redshift');md5----------------------------------f7415e33f972c03abd4f3fed36748f7a(1 row)
This content is subject to limited support.