Book Image

Effective Business Intelligence with QuickSight

By : Rajesh Nadipalli
Book Image

Effective Business Intelligence with QuickSight

By: Rajesh Nadipalli

Overview of this book

Amazon QuickSight is the next-generation Business Intelligence (BI) cloud service that can help you build interactive visualizations on top of various data sources hosted on Amazon Cloud Infrastructure. QuickSight delivers responsive insights into big data and enables organizations to quickly democratize data visualizations and scale to hundreds of users at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional BI tools. This book begins with an introduction to Amazon QuickSight, feature differentiators from traditional BI tools, and how it fits in the overall AWS big data ecosystem. With practical examples, you will find tips and techniques to load your data to AWS, prepare it, and finally visualize it using QuickSight. You will learn how to build interactive charts, reports, dashboards, and stories using QuickSight and share with others using just your browser and mobile app. The book also provides a blueprint to build a real-life big data project on top of AWS Data Lake Solution and demonstrates how to build a modern data lake on the cloud with governance, data catalog, and analysis. It reviews the current product shortcomings, features in the roadmap, and how to provide feedback to AWS. Grow your profits, improve your products, and beat your competitors.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Effective Business Intelligence with QuickSight
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

SPICE - overview and architecture


SPICE is an abbreviation for Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation, Engine and is the brain of QuickSight. It can source data from S3, RDS databases, Redshift, RDBMS databases, and, in future, EMR, Kinesis, and DynamoDB. SPICE has a great toolset of functions that can do lightweight transformation of data in memory, thereby eliminating the need for traditional ETL (Extract Transform and Load).

The following diagram shows the position of SPICE in an overall BI solution. On the left-hand side you see the various sources that can push data to SPICE. Data from them is cached by SPICE, which uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies, machine code generation, data compression, and auto-replication for high availability. The results from SPICE serve QuickSight analysis and, in future, SPICE will integrate with AWS BI partners such as Tableau, TIBCO, Qlick, and Domo using its SQL-like interface.

Figure 3.1: SPICE architecture

For each...