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| Performance | Extremely fast. Ideal for interactive analysis and dashboards with many users. | Performance depends entirely on the underlying data source. |
| Data Freshness | Data is as fresh as the last ingestion/refresh into SPICE. Requires a scheduled or manual refresh. | Data is queried in real-time from the source. Always up-to-date. |
| Source Load | Reduces the query load on the underlying data source as queries hit SPICE instead. | Puts a direct query load on the underlying data source for every visual interaction. |
| Use Case | Dashboards requiring high-speed interactivity, offloading production databases, consolidating data from multiple sources. | Dashboards requiring real-time data, or when the underlying source is a high-performance data warehouse (like Redshift or Snowflake). |
User Roles
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Admin: Manages QuickSight users and account-level settings, such as purchasing SPICE capacity and managing subscriptions. Admins can do everything authors and readers can do.
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Author: Can connect to data sources, create datasets, build analyses, and publish dashboards. This role is for developers, data analysts, and BI professionals.
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Reader: Can only view and interact with shared dashboards. They can filter data, drill down, and export data, but cannot change or save the dashboard. This role is for consumers of BI reports.
Key Features
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ML Insights: QuickSight integrates machine learning to provide features like:
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Anomaly Detection: Automatically runs on your data to find hidden insights and outliers.
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Forecasting: Predict future trends based on historical data.
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Auto-narratives: Generates plain-language summaries of your visualizations.
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Data Sources: Connects to a wide variety of sources, including:
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AWS Services: Redshift, S3, Athena, RDS, Aurora, IAM, etc.
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Third-party Databases: SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc., both on-premises and in the cloud.
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SaaS Applications: Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc.
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File Uploads: CSV, TSV, XLSX, JSON files.
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Embedded Analytics: You can embed QuickSight dashboards and visuals directly into your applications, portals, and websites to provide rich analytics to your end-users.
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Paginated Reports: Create and schedule highly formatted, multi-page reports (e.g., weekly business reviews, invoices) that can be exported as PDF or CSV.
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Stories: A feature that allows authors to create a guided tour through the visuals in an analysis to present a data narrative.
Security and Permissions
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Row-Level Security (RLS): Allows you to restrict access to data at the row level based on the user who is viewing it. This ensures users only see the data they are authorized to see (e.g., a regional manager only sees sales data for their region).
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Column-Level Security (CLS): Allows you to restrict access to specific columns in a dataset for specific users.
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IAM Integration: Uses IAM policies to manage permissions for QuickSight users and roles.
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VPC Connectivity: You can configure a private VPC connection to securely connect QuickSight to your data sources within an Amazon VPC without exposing them to the public internet.