Tho Le

A Data Scientist. Looking for knowledge!

Overview of Amazon QuickSight

02 Jul 2025 » cloud, aws, viz

Introduction

  • Amazon QuickSight: BI tool.
  • Amazon Q: a genAI-powered dashboard / report-building tool to explore data quickly.
  • How QuickSight is different from Amazon Q?
    • Q is a genAI capability (an separate product) and is integrated with QuickSight that allows user to interact with QS using natual language.
    • In QuickSight –> Security & Permission –> Need to Enable Amazon Q.
    • Need to create a Topic.
      • It’s like a context / project to provide to the LLM.
      • Connect to a dataset.
        • Columns have to be meaningful?
    • Questions:
      • Do we need to provide example for Amazon Q to learn first?
      • How to validate the answer provided by Q?
        • E.g. in Databricks Genie, we can also see the underlying SQL query correspond to the English question and then can validate and correct it so that it can do better next time.
        • There is a User Activity section where user can provide feedbacks.
      • What model underneath Q?
        • Use multiple models such as Nova. From tools like Amazon Bedrock.

Features

Interactive Dashboard

  • AI-assisted data storytelling: tell it to generate a report based on dashboard.
  • An advanced AI agent.

Ad-hoc Analysis

  • Users can ask ad-hoc questions (on-demand).

Machine Learning

  • Anomaly detection.
  • Forecasting.
  • NLQ (not realy ML)?
  • Questions:

Natural Language Querying (NLQ)

Embed dashboards into applications

Misc

  • Fast, in-memory engine called SPICE for efficient query performance. (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine)
  • RLS
  • Paginated Reporting

Pricing?

  • By usage, sessions. Can charged based on roles and number of users in each role.

Data Source Connectivity

    • AWS: Redshift, S3, RDS.
    • On-prem: databases, SaaS application.

Compare to other tools

  • v.s. Microsoft’s PBI, Databricks’ Genie: Each integrate better with their own cloud ecosystem.
  • QS: UI is not as user-friendly, graph/chart library is less extensive than some rivals.
    • Can’t extract underlying SQL like Genie.
  • Databricks’ Genie:
    • Limited on dashboard.
  • PBI:

Reference