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November 30, 2022

AWS Announces 5 New Capabilities for Amazon QuickSight

LAS VEGAS, Nov. 30, 2022 — AWS has announced five new capabilities to help customers streamline business intelligence (BI) operations using Amazon QuickSight, the most popular serverless BI service built for the cloud. Today’s announcement expands QuickSight Q, a natural language querying capability, to support forecast and “why” questions and automate data preparation, making it easier and faster to start asking questions in natural language.

Additionally, customers can now create and share paginated reports alongside interactive dashboards, quickly analyze and visualize billion-row datasets directly in QuickSight, and programmatically create and manage BI assets to accelerate migration from legacy systems. The new features announced today, combined with QuickSight’s scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing, enable customers to let users understand, visualize, and derive insights and predictions from data, regardless of technical expertise.

“Organizations today are composed of numerous stakeholders with varying levels of technical expertise—all of whom need access to critical business insights to make better decisions and share knowledge,” said G2 Krishnamoorthy, vice president of Analytics at AWS. “That is why more than 100,000 customers use QuickSight to power their BI needs. Today’s announcement makes QuickSight even more intuitive, flexible, and accessible while streamlining BI operations with a comprehensive and fast service built for the cloud. Whether users want to forecast sales using natural language queries, distribute critical operational reports, embed analytics in high-traffic websites, or visually analyze massive datasets, we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers by providing advanced BI capabilities that support data-driven decisions at scale.”

Support for forecast and “why” questions in Amazon QuickSight Q: QuickSight Q uses machine learning to enable any user to ask questions about business data in natural language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations in seconds. QuickSight Q lets anyone explore historical trends and metrics without technical expertise, allowing users to derive new insights from the data that powers their dashboards and reports.

Automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q: A new capability in QuickSight Q automatically infers and adds semantic information to datasets, reducing the time BI teams spend prepping data for natural language querying from days to minutes. To prepare data for natural language queries, BI teams today must manually translate shorthand representations and abbreviations optimized for BI dashboards or SQL queries into commonly used business terms (e.g., cust_ID translates to Customer ID). The automated data preparation feature in QuickSight Q uses pretrained machine learning models and learnings from a customer’s existing assets (e.g., dashboards and reports) to preconfigure business terms in each new dataset in minutes, reducing the time it takes to start querying data.

Paginated reporting built for the cloud: Paginated reports provide a formatted, printable summary of data that organizations can use to broadly share critical operational information like daily transaction summaries and weekly updates with business users (e.g., executives, managers, and front-line workers). While many organizations have adopted modern BI products, those tools lack the ability to create and share paginated reports. This means customers often maintain multiple systems—one for modern BI needs and a separate legacy system for paginated reports. These on-premises systems can cost millions of dollars in infrastructure, have rigid license fees, and require dedicated resources to maintain, including replicating datasets across both systems. With Amazon QuickSight Paginated Reports, customers can now create, consume, and manage paginated reports in the cloud with the familiar QuickSight interface, eliminating the costs and complexity of a separate on-premises system.

Simple and fast analysis for large datasets: Amazon QuickSight’s Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine (SPICE) provides lightning-fast performance at scale, handling more than 100 million queries every week and processing an average of tens of trillions of records per hour. Today, SPICE enables thousands of users in an organization to perform fast, interactive analyses simultaneously without any infrastructure setup or management. While SPICE supports datasets of up to 500 million rows, customers who want to use QuickSight’s rich visualizations to explore even larger datasets have previously had to rely on data engineers to manually orchestrate data between QuickSight and another data store (e.g., Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, or another data warehouse), which made it challenging to access and analyze very large datasets quickly. With billion-row support in SPICE, it’s easier to connect to data stores and ingest data into SPICE. Users now have greater autonomy to visually analyze large datasets directly in QuickSight, without coordinating with engineering teams to manually orchestrate data among services. Support for billion-row datasets is now available to all QuickSight Enterprise Edition customers.

Faster, programmatic migration to the cloud: QuickSight’s expanded application programming interface (API) capabilities now allow customers to create, manage, and edit their BI assets (e.g., dashboards, analysis, and reports) programmatically, helping accelerate and streamline migrations from on-premises legacy systems. Today’s BI tools lack full programmatic access to dashboards and reports, significantly complicating migration to a cloud-based BI offering. To move to the cloud, customers might need to re-create tens of thousands of dashboards and reports from scratch, which could take years. This barrier prevents many businesses from migrating away from legacy systems. API-based access to the underlying data models of dashboards and reports allows customers and partners to treat these assets like software source code, enabling fully programmatic deployments, peer code reviews, and auditability of all changes. Programmatic access to dashboards is available to all QuickSight Enterprise Edition customers at no additional cost.


Source: Amazon

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