Amazon QuickSight

• QuickSight is a very fast, easy-to-use, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data, anytime, on any device.
• enables organizations to scale their business analytics capabilities to hundreds of thousands of users, and delivers fast and responsive query performance by using SPICE – a robust in-memory engine.
• supports various datasources including
  • Excel files and flat files like CSV, TSV, CLF, ELF
  • On-premises databases like PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MySQL
  • SaaS applications like Salesforce
  • AWS data sources such as Redshift, RDS, Aurora, Athena, and S3
  • Google BigQuery (with Direct Query support for near real-time querying)
  • Snowflake and Starburst (with OAuth support for role-based access control)
• supports various functions to format and transform the data.
  • alias data fields and change data types.
  • subset the data using built in filters and perform database join operations using drag and drop.
  • create calculated fields using mathematical operations and built-in functions such conditional statements, string, numerical and date functions
• supports assorted visualizations that facilitate different analytical approaches:
  • Comparison and distribution – Bar charts (several assorted variants)
  • Changes over time – Line graphs, Area line charts
  • Correlation – Scatter plots, Heat maps
  • Aggregation – Pie graphs, Tree maps
  • Tabular – Pivot tables
  • Geospatial – Layer maps for custom shape file visualization
  • Custom – Highcharts visual for specialized charts (sunburst, network graphs, 3D charts)
• comes with a built-in suggestion engine that provides suggested visualizations based on the properties of the underlying datasets
• supports Stories, that provide guided tours through specific views of an analysis. They are used to convey key points, a thought process, or the evolution of an analysis for collaboration.
• supports Pixel-Perfect Reports (Paginated Reports) for creating highly formatted, printable business documents with exact page layout control, scheduled email delivery, and export to PDF/CSV/Excel.

Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine – SPICE

• QuickSight is built with “SPICE” – a Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine
• SPICE uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations and machine code generation to run interactive queries on large datasets and get rapid responses.
• SPICE supports rich data discovery and business analytics capabilities to help customers derive valuable insights from their data without worrying about provisioning or managing infrastructure.
• SPICE supports rich calculations to help derive valuable insights from the analysis without worrying about provisioning or managing infrastructure.
• Data in SPICE is persisted until it is explicitly deleted by the user.
• QuickSight can also be configured to keep the data in SPICE up-to-date as the data in the underlying sources change.
• SPICE automatically replicates data for high availability and enables QuickSight to scale to hundreds of thousands of users who can all simultaneously perform fast interactive analysis across a wide variety of AWS data sources.
• SPICE supports increased join sizes up to 20 GB (previously 1 GB) for secondary tables during data ingestion, enabling complex cross-source join tasks.
• SPICE supports Customer Managed Keys (CMK) for encrypting datasets, allowing revocation of access with one click and auditable access logs.
• SPICE supports Auto Purchase API to programmatically enable automatic capacity purchases when consumed capacity exceeds provisioned capacity.

Amazon Q in QuickSight – Generative BI

• Amazon Q in QuickSight (GA April 2024) brings generative AI-powered business intelligence capabilities to the entire organization using natural language.
• Amazon Q in QuickSight replaces and enhances the previous QuickSight Q NLQ feature, combining LLMs from Amazon Bedrock with QuickSight’s proven models.
• Key capabilities include:
  • Multi-visual Data Q&A – ask questions of data not answered in existing dashboards and get instant visual answers
  • Executive Summaries – generate natural language summaries of dashboards to quickly discover key trends and insights
  • Data Stories – automatically build documents and slides explaining data with natural language prompts
  • Dashboard Authoring – build dashboards using simple prompts to describe visuals, calculations, and refinements
  • Pixel-Perfect Report Generation – create reports using natural language descriptions
  • Scenario Analysis (re:Invent 2024) – agentic data analysis to solve complex business questions 10x faster than spreadsheets
  • Unstructured Insights – unified insights from structured databases plus unstructured data (documents, websites, emails, images) via Amazon Q Business integration
• Available by default to all Enterprise Edition users for data Q&A capabilities.
• Available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and South America (São Paulo).

QuickSight User Roles

• QuickSight Author ($24/month) – can connect to data sources, create visuals, analyze data, create interactive dashboards, and publish them with other users.
• QuickSight Author Pro ($40/month, reduced from $50) – all Author capabilities plus:
  • Build dashboards with Amazon Q using natural language
  • Build and share Q Topics to enable Q&A on specific data
  • Amazon Q Business Pro user entitlement included
  • Access to Quick Suite Enterprise capabilities
• QuickSight Reader ($3/month fixed) – consumes interactive dashboards, can log in via SAML/AD/QuickSight credentials, filter data, drill down, export as CSV, and ask questions of data with Amazon Q.
  • Readers do not have any allocated SPICE capacity.
• QuickSight Reader Pro ($20/month) – all Reader capabilities plus:
  • Create data stories with Amazon Q
  • Generate executive dashboard summaries with Amazon Q
  • Amazon Q Business Pro user entitlement included
  • Access to Quick Suite Professional capabilities
• Admin Pro – full generative BI capabilities plus account management permissions; billed as Author Pro.

QuickSight Security

• QuickSight supports multi-factor authentication (MFA) for the AWS account via the AWS Management console.
• For VPC with public connectivity, QuickSight’s IP address range can be added to the database instances’ security group rules to enable traffic flow into the VPC and database instances.
• QuickSight supports Row-level security (RLS)
  • RLS enables dataset owners to control access to data at row granularity based on permissions associated with the user interacting with the data.
  • With RLS, QuickSight users only need to manage a single set of data and apply appropriate row-level dataset rules to it.
  • All associated dashboards and analyses will enforce these rules, simplifying dataset management and removing the need to maintain multiple datasets for users with different data access privileges.
• QuickSight supports Column-level security (CLS)
  • CLS enables dataset owners to restrict access to specific columns in a dataset.
  • Users without access to restricted columns cannot create, view, or edit visuals that use those fields.
  • Combined with RLS, CLS provides fine-grained data governance over who can access what data within visualizations.
• QuickSight supports Private VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) Access, which uses an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for secure, private communication with data sources in a VPC. It also allows the use of AWS Direct Connect to create a secure, private link with the on-premises resources.
• QuickSight supports AWS PrivateLink to securely connect to data sources through VPC endpoints, keeping network traffic within the AWS infrastructure.
• QuickSight supports users defined via IAM, email signup, or AWS IAM Identity Center (with custom permissions for fine-grained capability control using directory groups).

QuickSight Editions

• Standard Edition – available through the CreateAccountSubscription API for individual users and small groups. New Quick Suite features are not available in the Standard edition.
• Enterprise Edition – offers enhanced functionality which includes:
  • QuickSight Readers
  • Amazon Q in QuickSight (Generative BI capabilities)
  • Connectivity to data sources in Private VPC
  • Row-level security and Column-level security
  • Hourly refresh of SPICE data
  • Encryption at Rest (with CMK support)
  • AD connectivity and group-based management of assets for AD accounts
  • AWS IAM Identity Center integration
  • Pixel-Perfect Reports
  • Embedded analytics
  • Brand customization

Amazon Quick Suite (October 2025)

• Amazon QuickSight evolved into Amazon Quick Suite in October 2025, expanding from a BI tool to a unified AI-powered workspace.
• Quick Suite represents an expansion of BI where AI agents work alongside users to answer complex questions, conduct deep research, and automate routine tasks.
• The core BI functionality is now called Quick Sight within the Quick Suite umbrella.
• Quick Suite introduces the following AI-powered capabilities:
  • Quick Research – delivers comprehensive, cited insights from both enterprise and public data sources in minutes
  • Quick Flows – helps users create and share workflow automations using natural language
  • Quick Automate – handles complex, multi-step business processes
  • Quick Index – a shared knowledge base of all company documents and data
  • Quick Chat – natural language interface to access all Quick Suite capabilities
  • Quick Spaces – customizable AI agents for specific teams (e.g., troubleshooting assistants, policy guides)
• Existing QuickSight environments (dashboards, datasets, analyses, security, permissions, API integrations) remain unchanged—no data migration is required.
• Compliance certifications (SOC, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR, FedRAMP) remain valid.
• AWS does not use customer content to train models.
• Available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Dublin), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) for new capabilities; all regions see the new UI/branding.

QuickSight Embedding

• QuickSight supports embedded analytics, allowing developers to embed interactive dashboards, visuals, Q&A experiences, and reports into applications and websites.
• Supports 1-click embedding, SDK-based embedding, and API-based embedding.
• Amazon Q in QuickSight generative BI capabilities (multi-visual Q&A, stories, executive summaries) can be embedded in applications.
• Supports sharing views of embedded dashboards, allowing readers to share unique links with their specific filter/bookmark state.
• Brand customization features allow overriding default Quick Suite styling for embedded scenarios.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

• Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
• AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
• AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
• Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.

1. You are using QuickSight to identify demand trends over multiple months for your top five product lines. Which type of visualization do you choose?
   1. Scatter Plot
   2. Pie Chart
   3. Pivot Table
   4. Line Chart
2. You need to provide customers with rich visualizations that allow you to easily connect multiple disparate data sources in S3, Redshift, and several CSV files. Which tool should you use that requires the least setup?
   1. Hue on EMR
   2. Redshift
   3. QuickSight
   4. Elasticsearch
3. A company needs to restrict access to specific columns in a QuickSight dataset so that only certain users can view salary data. Which feature should they use?
   1. Row-level Security (RLS)
   2. Column-level Security (CLS)
   3. IAM policies
   4. VPC Security Groups
4. A business analyst wants to ask natural language questions about sales data directly from a QuickSight dashboard without writing queries. Which feature enables this?
   1. QuickSight SPICE
   2. Amazon Q in QuickSight
   3. QuickSight Parameters
   4. QuickSight Calculated Fields
5. A company wants to generate weekly pixel-perfect PDF reports from QuickSight dashboards and distribute them via email to stakeholders who don’t have QuickSight access. Which QuickSight feature should they use?
   1. QuickSight Stories
   2. QuickSight Embedded Analytics
   3. QuickSight Pixel-Perfect Reports with scheduled email delivery
   4. QuickSight SPICE exports
6. An organization uses Amazon QuickSight and wants to ensure SPICE datasets are encrypted using their own encryption keys with the ability to revoke access. Which feature should they implement?
   1. AWS KMS default encryption
   2. S3 server-side encryption
   3. SPICE Customer Managed Keys (CMK)
   4. QuickSight VPC encryption
7. A company recently rebranded Amazon QuickSight and wants to understand the relationship between QuickSight and Quick Suite. Which statement is correct? (Select TWO)
   1. Amazon Quick Suite is the evolution of Amazon QuickSight that adds AI agents, research, and workflow automation capabilities
   2. Quick Suite replaces QuickSight and requires data migration
   3. Existing QuickSight dashboards, APIs, and security controls continue to work unchanged within Quick Suite
   4. Quick Suite requires a new subscription separate from QuickSight
   5. Quick Suite is only available in the Standard Edition

References

• Amazon QuickSight (Quick Sight)
• Amazon Quick Suite
• QuickSight Evolves to Quick Suite (Oct 2025)
• QuickSight 2024 Year in Review
• Amazon Q in QuickSight GA (Apr 2024)