What is Amazon Quicksight?

If you're looking for a powerful, cloud-based business intelligence service, Amazon QuickSight deserves serious consideration. With this innovative tool, you can easily share insightful data visualizations with your team, no matter where they are. QuickSight connects to your cloud data and seamlessly integrates information from multiple sources - AWS, third-party, big data, spreadsheets, SaaS, B2B, and more. And best of all, it's a fully managed service with enterprise-level security, global availability, and built-in redundancy, so you don't have to worry about any infrastructure.

As a way of visually displaying large amounts of data, QuickSight empowers decision-makers to explore and make sense of data in a user-friendly, interactive environment. Access your dashboards securely from any device, on or off your network. And with user-management tools that scale from 10 to 10,000 users, you can be confident in QuickSight's ability to grow with your business.

The products that compete with Amazon QuickSight include:

1. Tableau
2. Microsoft Power BI
3. SAP Lumira
4. IBM Cognos Analytics
5. Oracle BI

When selecting a business intelligence tool, it's crucial to make an informed decision. For an in-depth comparison between Amazon QuickSight and Microsoft Power BI, delve into Metal Toad's insightful blog post on Choosing the Right BI Tool: A Comparison of Power BI and Amazon QuickSight.

Amazon Quicksight advantages

1. Low TCO with no upfront license costs
2. Collaborative analytics without software installation
3. No need to manage granular database permissions with secure data access
4. Automated and customizable data insights with ML-powered machine learning.
5. Enterprise security features such as federated users, granular permissions, and secure data encryption.
6. Additional enterprise features including pay-per-session pricing, embedded console analytics, multitenancy, and larger data import quotas.

How does Amazon Quicksight work?

What kinds of data can be imported into Amazon Quicksight?

Amazon Quicksight can be fed by several different types of datasources:

1. Relational data sources (databases)
2. File imports
3. APIs

Relational data sources

You can use any of the following relational data stores as data sources for Amazon QuickSight:

• Amazon Athena
• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon OpenSearch Service
• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Redshift Spectrum
• Amazon S3
• Amazon S3 Analytics
• Apache Spark 2.0 or later
• AWS IoT Analytics
• Databricks (E2 Platform only) on Spark 1.6 or later, up to version 3.0
• Exasol 7.1.2 or later
• MariaDB 10.0 or later
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 or later
• MySQL 5.1 or later
• Oracle 12c or later
• PostgreSQL 9.3.1 or later
• Presto 0.167 or later
• Snowflake
• Teradata 14.0 or later
• Timestream

File imports

QuickSight supports files in the following formats which can come from s3 or your local network:

• CSV and TSV – Comma-delimited and tab-delimited text files
• ELF and CLF – Extended and common log format files
• XLSX – Microsoft Excel files
• JSON – Flat or semistructured data files

More on Amazon Quicksight's support of JSON files

Basic support for JSON flat-file data includes the following:

• Inferring the schema
• Determining data types
• Flattening the data
• Parsing JSON (JSON embedded objects) from flat files

Support for JSON file structures (.json) includes the following:

• JSON records with structures
• JSON records with root elements as arrays

The following JSON features ARE NOT supported:

• Reading JSON with a structure containing a list of records

• List attributes and list objects within a JSON record; these are skipped during import

• Customizing upload or configuration settings

• parseJSON functions for SQL and analyses

• Error messaging for invalid JSON

• Extracting a JSON object from a JSON structure

• Reading delimited JSON records

APIs

APIs that Amazon Quicksight supports out-of-the-box include the following:

• Jira
• ServiceNow
• Adobe Analytics
• GitHub
• Salesforce
• Twitter

Example Amazon Quicksight Dashboards

AWS has created a number of example dashboards to help understand what's possible, organized by industry:

• Education
• Energy & Utility
• Finance
• Healthcare
• IoT
• Insurance
• Manufacturing
• Retail

Each of these dashboards is by no means the limit, but provides a great jumping off point for people curious to know what is possible.

If you'd like to know more about Amazon Quicksight or would like to get a free estimate on your next Amazon Quicksight project, please don't hesitate to reach out.