Amazon QuickSight

  • Business analytics service
    • Build visualization
    • Perform ad-hoc analysis
    • Quickly get business insights from data
    • Multiple devices (browsers, mobile)
  • Serverless

QuickSight Data Sources

  • Redshift
  • RDS
  • Athena
  • On-premise databases
  • S3 or on-premise files
    • Excel
    • CSV, TSV
    • Some log format
  • Can do simple data transformation in data preparation

SPICE

  • Data sets are imported into SPICE
    • Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation, Engine
    • Columnar storage
  • Each user gets 10GB of SPICE
  • Highly available and scalable

QuickSight Use Cases

  • Interactive ad-hoc exploration / visualization of data
  • Create dashboards / stories
  • Visualize data from
    • AWS (RDS, Redshift, Athena, S3)
    • On-premise databases
    • Saas applications (Salesforce)
    • Other JDBC / ODBC data sources

QuickSight Anti-Patterns

  • Highly formatted reports
  • ETL
    • Use Glue, Apache Spark

QuickSight Security

  • MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication)
  • VPC connectivity
    • Add QuickSight’s IP address range to security group to connect database
  • Private VPC access
    • ENI (Elastic Network Interface)
    • AWS Direct Connect
  • RLS (Row-Level Security)

QuickSight User Management

  • Standard Edition
    • IAM or email signup
  • Enterprise Edition
    • Microsoft Active Directory

QuickSight Pricing

  • Annual subscription (user / month)
  • Extra SPICE capacity (GB / month)
  • Month to month (GB / month)
  • Enterprise edition
    • Encryption at rest
    • Microsoft Active Directory integration

QuickSight Visual Types

  • AutoGraph
  • Bar Charts (histograms)
    • For comparison and distribution
  • Line graphs
    • For changes over time
  • Scatter plots, heat maps
    • For correlation
  • Pie graphs, tree maps
    • For aggregation
  • Pivot tables
    • For tabular data
  • Stories

Alternative Visualization Tools

  • Web-based
    • D3.js, Chart.js, Highchart.js
  • Business Intelligence Tools
    • Tableau, MicroStrategy