QuickSight – An effective BI Solution from AWS

What is QuickSight?

Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data. Using its cloud-based service you can easily connect to your data, perform advanced analysis, and create stunning visualizations and rich dashboards that can be accessed from any browser or mobile device.

Amazon QuickSight is built on top of “SPICE” – a Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine. SPICE uses a combination of columnar storage, machine code generation, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations, and data compression to allow users to run interactive queries on large datasets. The engine supports rich calculations to help users derive insights which are valuable and from the analytics reports generated users don’t need to worry about provisioning or managing infrastructure. The SPICE engine automatically replicates data for high availability thus enabling QuickSight to scale to thousands of users who can all simultaneously perform fast interactive analysis.

Why QuickSight?

Get Started Quickly Go from zero to analytics expert in minutes. Just log in, point to a data source, and create your first visualization in minutes. QuickSight suggests the best visualizations for your data using its innovative AutoGraph technology. Answers in Instants You can import massive amounts of data from various data sources; our Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine (SPICE) works in the cloud to get you fast responses – just connect to your data, visualize and share. Low Cost Starting at $9 per user per month, QuickSight is 1/10th of the cost of traditional BI solutions with no upfront investments, no expensive hardware to purchase or infrastructure to manage, and no additional license or maintenance fees.

What does it solve?

Amazon QuickSight, very fast, easy to use business intelligence for your big data needs at a marginal cost of traditional on-premises solutions. This cool new product will be available in preview form later this month and will be able to address different customer’s Business Intelligence (BI) needs.

QuickSight will be able to handle many types of data-intensive workloads including ad targeting, customer segmentation, forecasting & planning, marketing & sales analytics, inventory & shipment tracking, IoT device stream management, and clickstream analysis.

QuickSight lets you get started in minutes. You log in, point to a data source, and begin to visualize your data. As you do so, you’ll benefit from the following features: Access to Data Sources – It can access data from many different sources, both on-premises and in the cloud. There’s built-in support for Amazon Redshift, RDS, Amazon Aurora, EMR, DynamoDB, Kinesis, S3, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and flat files. Connectors allow access to data stored in third-party sources such as Salesforce. Fast Calculation – It is built around SPICE (the Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine). It runs in the cloud and to deliver a fast, interactive data visualization experience. Ease of Use – It auto-discovers AWS data sources and makes it easy for us to connect to them. As you select tables and fields, it recommends the most appropriate types of graphs and other visualizations. You can share your visualizations with your colleagues and you can assemble several visualizations to tell a story with data. You can even embed your reports in applications and websites. Effortless to Scale – It provides fast analytics and visualization while scaling to handle to hundreds of thousands of users and terabytes of data per organization. Low Cost – It will provide you with robust Business Intelligence at 1/10th the cost of on-premises solutions from the old guard. Partner-Ready – It provides a simple SQL-like interface to enable BI tools from AWS Partners to access data stored in SPICE so that customers can use the BI tools they are familiar with and get even faster performance at scale.

How does it solve?

Follow these simple steps to create different visualizations based on your data source.

Step 1: When you open QuickSight, will show you different data sources which imported for analysis. Step 2: Click on “Manage Data”, to allow you to load new data set / manage loaded ones. Step 3: Click on New Data set, to import new data source from any of supported database. Step 4: We have taken an example to load CSV file. Click on Upload File and select your csv file. Step 5: Click on next button which allows you to edit data and facilitates to create visualization. Step 6: Click on Visualize button and it allows you to select different chart from Visual Types. Step 7: Now drag and drop any field on X/ Y / Value boxes to create visualization. Step 8: Click on any data points on chart, it allows you to add filters for the data. Step 9: Allows you to change color of any data points. Step 10: You can exclude any data point at the runtime, which will be added as filter. Step 11: If you want to remove Filter again, you need to click on left side filter and select Delete Filter value.

How is it different from traditional Business Intelligence (BI) solutions?

Traditional BI solutions often require teams of data engineers to spend months building complex data models before generating a report. They typically lack interactive ad-hoc data exploration and visualization, limiting users to canned reports and pre-selected queries. Traditional BI solutions also require significant up-front investment in complex and costly hardware and software, and then customers to invest in even more infrastructure to maintain fast query performance as database sizes grow. This cost and complexity makes it difficult for companies to enable analytics solutions across their organizations.

QuickSight has been designed to solve these problems by bringing the scale and flexibility of the AWS Cloud to business analytics. Unlike traditional BI or data discovery solutions, getting started with QuickSight is simple and fast.

QuickSight seamlessly discovers your data sources in AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). You can connect to any of the data sources discovered by QuickSight and get insights from this data in minutes.

You can choose for QuickSight to keep the data in SPICE up-to-date as the data in the underlying sources change. SPICE supports rich data discovery and business analytics capabilities to help customers derive valuable insights from their data without worrying about provisioning or managing infrastructure. Organizations pay a low monthly fee for each QuickSight user, eliminating the cost of long-term licenses. With QuickSight, organizations can deliver rich business analytics functionality to all employees without incurring a huge cost upfront.

How is it likely to progress in future?

AWS is a BI vendor now – just like Salesforce is with its Analytics cloud and Microsoft is with its PowerBI. It’s a natural progression for cloud vendors to offer analytics capabilities for data already stored on their platforms. It just may come at the expense of third-party ISVs who saw that opportunity first.