Amazon Web Services (AWS): QuickSight: Points to remember

Let's learn about Amazon QuickSight:

  1. QuickSight is a very fast, easy-to-use, cloud-powered business analytics service.

  2. It makes easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis & quickly get business insights from their data, anytime, on any device.

  3. QuickSight enables organizations to scale their business analytics capabilities to hundreds of thousands of users & delivers fast & responsive query performance by using a robust in-memory engine.

  4. QuickSight is built with 'SPICE' – a Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine.

  5. A QuickSight Author is a user who can connect to data sources, create visuals & analyze data.

  6. A QuickSight Reader is a user who consumes interactive dashboards.

  7. Individual end-users can be provisioned to access QuickSight as Readers. Reader pricing applies to manual session interactions only.

  8. Readers can be easily upgraded to authors via the QuickSight user management options.

  9. A QuickSight Admin is a user who can manage QuickSight users and account-level preferences, as well as purchase SPICE capacity and annual subscriptions for the account.

  10. QuickSight Authors and Readers can be upgraded to Admins at any time.

  1. QuickSight Reader sessions are of 30-minute duration each. Each session is charged at $0.30 with maximum charges of $5 per Reader in a month.

  2. QuickSight admins can also upgrade Standard Edition accounts to Enterprise Edition if needed.

  3. The iPhone app for QuickSight lets users access their data anywhere & explore analyses, stories & dashboards.

  4. QuickSight supports the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer version 10 & above and Edge.

  5. Users can connect to AWS data sources including RDS, Aurora, Redshift, Athena & S3.

  6. Users can also upload Excel spreadsheets or flat files (CSV, TSV, CLF, and ELF), connect to on-premises databases like SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL and import data from SaaS applications like Salesforce.

  7. QuickSight has an innovative technology called AutoGraph that allows it to select the most appropriate visualizations based on the properties of the data, such as cardinality and data type.

  8. Dashboards are a collection of visualizations, tables & other visual displays arranged and visible together.

  9. Users can perform typical arithmetic and comparison functions; conditional functions such as if,then; and date, numeric, and string calculations.

  10. Users have several options to get their data into QuickSight: file upload, connect to AWS data sources, connect to external data stores over JDBC/ODBC, or through other API-based data store connectors.

  1. Row-level security (RLS) enables QuickSight dataset owners to control access to data at row granularity based on permissions associated with the user interacting with the data.

  2. Users can share an analysis, dashboard, or story using the share icon from the QuickSight service interface.

  3. Users will not be able to downgrade from QuickSight Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition.

  4. Private VPC Access for QuickSight uses an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for secure, private communication with data sources in a VPC.

  5. QuickSight auto discovery feature detects data sources only within the AWS region of the QuickSight endpoint to which users are connected.

A Points to remember series by Piyush Jalan.