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Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

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Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#141

Post by solutionyogi »

baconner wrote: post #132
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…

There are a few similar technologies out there some of which are open source. Prestodb comes to mind but there's also some other closed systems like powerbi (with some underlying azure distributed data warehouse bits), etc out there. What's happening in the industry I think is that there was a first wave of data discovery products (tableau being the prime example) that seek to get you right to reporting and data expl…

I had never heard of Prestodb. That looks very interesting. Any other solutions that you are familiar with?

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#142

Post by scuba_man_spiff »

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…

Technology focused companies can have the same issues. In order to build a clear understanding, it requires not just having the data available (the RIGHT data obviously, and clear and extensive documentation on specific definitions and business meanings), but it also requires education within the organization of how one should look at, evaluate, and understand the different pieces of a business.

The good thing though is that there's a tipping point, where once ~1/3 or so of people fully grok how to evaluate and understand the metrics they're looking at, those who do understand start helping (or calling out) those that don't, lifting competence throughout the organization.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#143

Post by saosebastiao »

wpietri wrote: post #69
saosebastiao wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Andrew Jassy is the person you are looking for. Jeff Bezos doesn't give a shit about the day to day strategy of AWS or any other existing Amazon business. He has implicitly said as much in his speeches at Amazon. He really only cares about the next billion dollar business to build within Amazon. Jassy leads AWS, which is the only technologically innovative part of Amazon. The retail side of Amazon is a techno…

That definitely matches my understanding. As a long-time user of both Amazon and AWS (respectively 1997 and 2006), their product management strategies seem very different to me. A lot of Amazon stuff smacks of high-level micromanagement. E.g., their thoroughly failed phone. Or the disappointing feature mish-mash that is the Kindle app. On the positive side, the original Kindle was groundbreaking because of similar mi…

I would agree with that. Small story: Working on the retail side of Amazon, one day I got pissed that if I wanted to use PostgreSQL that I had to set up my own EC2 server and EBS infrastructure and maintain it, whereas if I wanted a MySQL instance I could just use RDS. I had a few legitimate usecases at the time that required PostGIS, so I was annoyed about it and I vented on a few mailing lists about the lack of PostgreSQL in RDS.

In a move that I would have never seen in the retail side, a product manager at RDS emailed me and set up a meeting with me and a director and VP. He invited me to make my case for having PostgreSQL as an RDS option. For about an hour I explained why the existing options didn't fit my use case, how there was a burgeoning market that was waiting for it due to Oracle's mismanagement of MySQL, and how there were several teams within Amazon that preferred the strictness and standards compliance of PostgreSQL but chose MySQL due to not having to manage it. They thanked me, and less than a year later there was a public announcement of a PostgreSQL offering in RDS.

I don't think I can take full credit for them launching it...they already had public forum threads of people asking for it and tons of +1 responses. But they actually listened to me, and they took into account my expressed desires to have several extensions available as well. That sort of bottoms up communication doesn't happen on the other side of Amazon.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#144

Post by 5h »

mistermann wrote: post #124
5h wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 morn…

I'd be interested to learn more about this, I've never heard of anyone importing XML into Excel before - typically "flat files" or SQL datasets are imported into an Excel table, upon which you can quickly build a pivot table, etc. Are you pulling in nested data?

yes, exactly that, drag an xml file into excel, choose "generate a schema", then you can drag and drop fields from your nested structure,

parent records will be repeated intelligently for nested sub-records.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#145

Post by wpietri »

saosebastiao wrote: post #143
wpietri wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That definitely matches my understanding. As a long-time user of both Amazon and AWS (respectively 1997 and 2006), their product management strategies seem very different to me. A lot of Amazon stuff smacks of high-level micromanagement. E.g., their thoroughly failed phone. Or the disappointing feature mish-mash that is the Kindle app. On the positive side, the original Kindle was groundbreaking because of similar mi…

I would agree with that. Small story: Working on the retail side of Amazon, one day I got pissed that if I wanted to use PostgreSQL that I had to set up my own EC2 server and EBS infrastructure and maintain it, whereas if I wanted a MySQL instance I could just use RDS. I had a few legitimate usecases at the time that required PostGIS, so I was annoyed about it and I vented on a few mailing lists about the lack of Pos…

Nice. Glad to hear that AWS builds products exactly how I think they should be built.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#146

Post by discordance »

mistermann wrote: post #124
5h wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 morn…

I'd be interested to learn more about this, I've never heard of anyone importing XML into Excel before - typically "flat files" or SQL datasets are imported into an Excel table, upon which you can quickly build a pivot table, etc. Are you pulling in nested data?

I import nested XML into Excel all the time. You will need to create an XML Map first. Look under Excel/Developer/XML Source/XML Maps

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#147

Post by dskrvk »

buremba wrote: post #103
JPKab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Built from the ground up for the cloud, Amazon QuickSight's Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine ("SPICE") uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations, machine code generation, and data compression to allow users to run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses.

The description sounds awfully similar to Spark, yet they say it's "built from the ground up", which I assume means "from scratch".

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#148

Post by dhj »

Jgrubb wrote: post #74
erik-n wrote: post #65

>Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (“SPICE”) Now that's a nice acronym! I think Amazon have skilled people in charge of marketing. They make their announcements feel exciting but not too "markety".

On the one hand, you're totally right about the annoucements. On the other hand, the names they give their AWS products are pretty mystifying. AWS Snowball?

AWS Snowball is a play on AWS Glacier. Glacier is the slow moving practically frozen storage system. Snowball takes the same stuff and hurls it rapidly to a destination. Pretty slick.

Re: Amazon QuickSight – Business Intelligence by AWS

#149

Post by wpietri »

gshx wrote: post #79
wpietri wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building your business around carefully constructed employee ignorance is a dangerous strategy. It basically assumes that they won't do any useful thinking. That was fine circa 1930, where treating people as dumb pairs of hands was an effective strategy because there was so much manual work to do. But the more we turn rote work over to machines and software, the less this will work.

Agree with your comment wholeheartedly. My comment was mostly around business information flow to the market since that's regulated due to various reasons.

Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. Thanks for clarifying.
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