News

Amazon QuickSight for Big Data Analytics Emerges from Preview

• By David Ramel
• 11/16/2016

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) yesterday announced Amazon QuickSight, used for Big Data analytics, is now generally available.

Described as an easy-to-use tool for inexpensive business intelligence (BI), Amazon QuickSight was battle-tested by more than 1,500 organizations of all sizes in a preview lasting more than a year.

"Amazon QuickSight provides you with very fast, easy to use, cloud-powered business analytics at 1/10th the cost of traditional on-premises solutions," AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr said in a blog post yesterday. "QuickSight lets you get started in minutes. You log in, point to a data source, and begin to visualize your data. Behind the scenes, the SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-Memory Calculation Engine) will run your queries at lightning speed and provide you with highly polished data visualizations."

Those data sources range from other AWS services -- such as Amazon Redshift (data warehouse), Amazon RDS (relational database service), Amazon Aurora (MySQL-compatible database) and Amazon S3 (object storage) -- to databases (via connectors) that can be hosted on-premises in addition to the cloud, such as SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and even Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Salesforce and similar services.

Future support is planned for hooking into Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce), Amazon DynamoDB (NoSQL, and Amazon Kinesis (streaming data), along with other cloud applications.

After connecting, QuickSight can slice and dice the data and present it in varying ways, and it will even recommend data visualizations to try out, based on the nature of the dataset. Along with that suggestion engine, the tool suggests graph types that would be most suitable for the data being analyzed, using algorithms that can learn from your previous analyses.

According to documentation, QuickSight can be used in conjunction with other BI solutions such as Domo, Tableau, TIBCO and Qlik, enabling users to leverage QuickSight's SPICE technology for fast queries of large datasets.

QuickSight can be used in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions, starting at $9 per user per month for the Standard edition in a one-year commitment. In addition to Standard, an Enterprise edition and a Free Tier option are also available, along with a 60-day trial.