Amazon QuickSight Summary
Amazon QuickSight is a serverless machine powered business intelligence service, and so when you hear business intelligence, that means that you’re going to create interactive dashboards.
So this is what QuickSight looks like, you can create dashboards and these dashboards are connected to data sources that you own, and therefore you can create these nice visuals.
So it’s fast, it’s automatically scalable, you can embed it in website, and you get a per-session pricing.
The use cases for QuickSight are going to be around business analytics, building visualization, performing ad-hoc analysis in the visual fashion, to get business insights using data.
And so you can connect to many data sources such as RDS, Aurora, Athena, Redshift, S3, and so on.
Now there is something called the SPICE engine, it’s an in-memory computation engine and it only works if you actually import data directly into Amazon QuickSight.
It doesn’t work if Amazon QuickSight is connected to another database.
And finally, QuickSight has some very nice user level features, and so it’s possible in the Enterprise edition of Amazon QuickSight to set up column-level security, CLS, to prevent some columns from being displayed for some users if they don’t have enough access rights.
So what does QuickSight integrate with?
Well, you can integrate it with many data sources from AWS, for example, your RDS database, or Aurora, or Redshift, which is a great data warehousing service, or Athena to do ad-hoc queries on Amazon S3, or Amazon S3 to actually import data, or OpenSearch, or Timestream to visualize your time stream data in an optimized fashion.
You can also integrate with third party data sources that are software as a service and supported by QuickSight, and the full list is on the QuickSight website, but some of them include Salesforce, and also Jira.
You can also integrate with third party databases such as Teradata, or for example, an on-premises database that is using the JDBC protocol internally.
And as I said, you can import data sources directly into QuickSight, such as your Excel files, your CSV file, JSON documents, TSV, or the EFS CLF format for log formats.
And if these data sources are imported into Amazon QuickSight, then you can leverage the SPICE engine to perform in memory computation in a very, very fast way.
