Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#101

Post by copsarebastards » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:14 PM UTC

wil421 wrote: post #51

copsarebastards wrote: post #42

Currently 6 out of 30 links on HN are Amazon links, 4 of them in the top 5. Looks like someone paid for placement.

How was this different from when Apple anncouned new iPhones, iPads and Apple TV's last month? Or when Google announced the new chrome cast and music streaming device? Both were at the top on their respective days and discussed ad nauseam in the comments.

> How was this different from when Apple anncouned new iPhones, iPads and Apple TV's last month?

It's not. I'm not sure why you're asking this.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#102

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:35 PM UTC

ticktocktick wrote: post #50

m0th87 wrote: post #19

We use Chartio at my company. If you haven't tried it yet, this product is stellar - almost all of our BI needs are handled directly by stakeholders rather than having to go through an engineer, and their support is very helpful and responsive. I would consider moving off to something like Quicksight if it supported redis. Some of our BI-related data is stored there, and currently to get at it we have an app that pro…

It is terrific that your end users are willing to spend the time and effort on building their own BI solutions. In my experience, at least with C-levels, that is not the case at all. C-levels also tend to want the most stuff.

I agree, but I must point out that in some cases the alternative to the "time and effort" involved in the exec playing around with a particular end-user report tool is the time and effort involved in a series of meetings attended by the exec and everyone on the chain between the exec and whoever is actually building the reports.

If "not able to specify a report format to a software service, even with assistance-as-needed from more technical users" disqualified one from executive employment, would any firm actually be hurt by that?

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#103

Post by buremba » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:36 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #98

buremba wrote: post #25

SPICE is definitely the most interesting part of this announcement but there isn't enough information about it.

SPICE looks to me to be extremely similar to Google BigQuery. I'm very curious about how it differs.

I'm not sure about that because they say that SPICE is an in-memory query engine unlike BigQuery which is a distributed query engine that fetches data from a persistent distributed file-system. It seems to me more like Spark in-memory RDDs that caches data fetched from external data sources.

They also support incremental loading similar to Periscope.io which is actually quite cool. I would be great if they could give more information (syntax etc.) about SPICE.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#104

Post by greggyb » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:40 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #11

Presumably this is for data that you want graphs of but doesn't fit in Excel?

Since 2010, Excel has had a native add-in called Power Pivot which can handle 100M+ row fact tables and provides a full dimensional modeling experience.

"Too big for Excel" is, quite literally, a problem of the last decade.

Edit: typo small != big

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#105

Post by greggyb » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:46 PM UTC

realcul wrote: post #40

Looks similar to Power BI. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/features

This is the direction most of the major players are trying to go.

I thought the same when I saw some of the visuals as well. I'd say Microsoft has the advantage in the enterprise/corporate space. Everyone uses Office already, and Power BI is included for free as add-ons to Excel since 2010. Power BI collaboration portals are also free for the equivalent of Amazon's $9 tier.

It's cool to see competition in this space. The real power isn't in building a better BI tool for BI professionals - that's pretty much a solved problem.

The problem is capturing and leveraging the business knowledge that lives in Excel spreadsheets or Google spreadsheets on business users' own drives. That's where a lot of this excitement comes in.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#106

Post by shrikant » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #87

solutionyogi wrote: post #13

For me, the most interesting part is SPICE. To implement a data warehouse, one creates a star schema (OLAP) database from a regular OLTP database. This involves massive amount of work. It looks like SPICE aims to replace the need for OLAP database and produce similar data directly from OLTP systems. I would love to know more about this engine. I hope Amazon open sources the engine (I highly doubt that they will do it…

My question is how does SPICE differ from BigQuery? I can connect to BigQuery from Tableau, BIME, Chartio, etc.

The documentation for QuickSight mentions that Tableau can connect to SPICE as well.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#107

Post by caractacus » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 8:58 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #38

saganus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as I understand BI, also for when you want complex graphs that can't be easily modeled in Excel. With BI solutions you can perform "slices" as they call it, of multi-dimensional data (cubes), and then represent that as graphs that can also be used for drill-down on one or more dimensions of said data. When you have say 17 dimensions, these solutions are easier to use than using excel to try to do the same. I have…

It's all just pivot tables, in the end. Excel solved most data slicing/drilldown problems years ago. Only issue has always been data size limits and access to live, up to data data (though Excel's also been able to hit external OLAP services for data for a long time too).

And the data size limit is excel is stifling. 1m maximum rows? That can get filled very quickly.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#108

Post by 5h » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 9:22 PM UTC

vkb wrote: post #26

Having worked in some form BI for almost the entirety of my career now, there is not a single, consistent form of BI dashboard that is prevalent across any company. Every solution ends up being unique, because every company has a unique data set-up, stakeholders, definition of metrics, and access needs. I've worked with Tableau, Domo, Oracle products, you name it. What's the solution that is passed around the most? E…

Excel also has a pretty easy to understand xml import,

At my a new gig I've just avoided having to write add 'just one more report' to the fragile homebrew report designer by letting people pull out structured data and make their own reports. Code required was trivial & the risk was super low as we could just use existing API methods to get the XML out.

This has caught my eye though, so I'll have a tinker in the morning.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#109

Post by lazaroclapp » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 9:44 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #64

ececconi wrote: post #9

I've been working exclusively in implementing BI solutions for the past five years. The thing that depresses me the most is not that BI solutions take forever to implement and cost a lot, but that clients many times just don't understand the data they are trying to report on. Many times it leads to over-engineered BI solutions just for one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used. I'm sure mor…

> one report that a client says is mission critical, but is never used. My dad started developing software in the late 60s. As a kid (let's say circa 1982, definitely in the minicomputer era), I remember him talking about a problem at work: to do all their daily processing, they needed about 28 hours. A lot of the workload was reporting, so he asked managers what reports were no longer useful. Naturally, he was assur…

Well, the only issue I can see with that now a days is if one such report is actually needed only for compliance purposes. Then, five years down the line, an audit happens and 1825 copies of that required daily report happen to be missing...

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#110

Post by uxcn » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 10:25 PM UTC

brador wrote: post #83

Daishiman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under those metrics, almost all of Amazon's products have been flops and none are not any way similar to the cash cows that Google and Apple have managed to develop and maintain without succumbing to competitors. I don't think that having to run rust to stay in place the way Amazon does is a sustainable business strategy.

As an investor I'm not looking for Thiels "sustainable business strategy", I want growth. New products, new markets, pushing the envelope. And that comes from taking risks,, shipping, and dealing with failures. Google and Apple are simply not doing that in a meaningful way, and their share price reflects that.

I'm not sure I agree with this about Amazon, but some of it may just be strategy opinion differences. Apple and Google both have higher capitalizations, but more importantly they operate at growing profits as opposed to a loss. Google's share price is also substantially higher than Amazon's.

Bezos has definitely made some good decisions, but I think attributing too much to one person (correct or incorrect) is a bit of a problem. Either the company fails without that person, or the perception is that the company can't succeed without that person.

Regardless, my personal opinion on Amazon's overall retail strategy and execution is honestly pretty bad.