Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) Serverless service focused on creating visualizations, dashboards, and reports. It is not ideal for performing complex ad-hoc SQL queries like Athena.

QuickSight supports querying data using SQL through integrations with Athena, Redshift, or other databases, its primary use case is visualizing data, not running exploratory SQL queries.

Amazon QuickSight Q is a natural language querying feature in Amazon QuickSight that allows users to ask questions about their data in plain language (e.g., English) and receive instant visual answers.

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1. Benefits of Amazon QuickSight

  1. Data Visualization: Create interactive dashboards with charts, graphs, and visuals to represent data clearly.
  2. Business Intelligence: Perform ad-hoc analysis to discover trends, patterns, and actionable insights from business data in real time.
  3. Integration with AWS Services: Works seamlessly with AWS services like Redshift, S3, RDS, Athena, Aurora, and DynamoDB for direct data integration.
  4. Machine Learning Insights: Incorporate built-in machine learning-powered insights like anomaly detection and forecasting.
2. QuickSight Vs QuickSight Q
  1. QuickSight lets you manually build dashboards and reports.
  2. QuickSight Q lets you type questions in plain English and automatically get charts and answers.

3. Example using Glue, Athena and QuickSight Together

Suppose you have lots of raw data files (like CSVs or JSONs) stored in Amazon S3.

  1. AWS Glue:
    • → Crawls the S3 data and creates a data catalog (tables + schema info).
    • → Basically organizes your messy files into a database-like structure.
  2. Amazon Athena:
    • → Uses the Glue catalog to query that S3 data using SQL — no server needed.
    • → You can write SQL like "SELECT * FROM sales_data WHERE region = 'US'".
  3. Amazon QuickSight:
    • → Connects to Athena.
    • → Visualizes the SQL query results — creates charts, dashboards, reports.

Glue organizes the data → Athena queries it → QuickSight visualizes it.

4. Is QuickSight better than Tableau?

  1. QuickSight: Cheaper, easier for AWS users, and good for basic to moderate dashboards.
  2. Tableau: Acquired by Salesforce, is more powerful, flexible, and better for complex, high-end visualizations — but it's costlier and needs more setup.