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.<p>I'm sure more technology focused companies don't have any issues using these self-service models, but you wouldn't believe the innumeracy that some people have in industry.
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.<p>I've worked with Tableau, Domo, Oracle products, you name it. What's the solution that is passed around the most? Excel sheets, because they travel easily and have all-around permissions.<p>I've been waiting for an out-of-the-box solution that's at least relatively easy to leverage across different organizations, but I haven't seen a painless one yet.<p>I'm hopeful that Quicksight, while not the be-all end-all solution, provides an example for others to follow, if it does end up being easy to set up and use.
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.<p>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 proxies data from there to postgres for Chartio's sake.
There are so many BI tools around that it's hard to figure out which solution is going to be best for a particular use case. Creating further confusion, it seems like most "enterprise" BI products aren't explained properly on their websites and are hidden behind "request a demo". It's nearly impossible to evaluate all the possibilities without going crazy.<p>I want to be able to generate my domain models in some way. Point and click data descriptions are awful. Letting certain people work with raw data is fine, but a lot of users are going to want to work with names that make sense to them. Let me define models with text, just like ORM models.<p>I want row based security. Let me assign groups to values on certain models. This essentially boils down to hidden filters and required tables.<p>It should all be web based. I'm not exposing my database directly to customers.<p>It should definitely not cost 100k a year.<p>I like the idea of QuickSight, but I can already see that it's not going to work for my needs. But at least they give an upfront description and price. Here's hoping the pricing model drives down the crazy license fees the other vendors are extracting.
We're trying out Apache Spark with Apache Zeppelin and it's been a pleasure so far. We faced the same problems that everyone else mentioned here -- data is not accessible to people who need it and every datasource requires different tools.<p>What we like about Apache Spark is that it can take any source and provide the same very fast and programmatic (code reuse!) interface for analysis. Think JSON data dumps from MixPanel, SQL databases, some Excel spreadsheet someone threw together etc.<p>Apache Zeppelin is a little bit limited in the visualization that comes out of the box, but the benefits of having a shared data language across the company is just such a huge plus. Also, super easy to add data visualization options and hopefully companies will start to contribute these back to the project.
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).
I say: Bezos is the #1 CEO in Tech right now.<p>Amazon takes risks, and <i>ships</i> innovative products and services every month. Their risk taking is relentless and they take failure in their stride. They "get" how to do push.<p>No other tech company comes close to their pace. And the key to that is the juicy under the radar micro manager that is Jeff Bezos. If there was an award for best tech CEO. 2015, i'd nominate him in a flash.
I'm glad to see they put a little more effort into the product page for this release than seems typical for AWS products. It's much easier on the eyes and, at least for me, much more readable.
A lot of what you are paying for in BI solutions is implementation costs and then to a lesser extent yearly maintenance and support costs. I wonder how they intend to lower implementation costs, since that is kind of lengthy and inherently difficult process.
Looks similar to Power BI.
<a href="https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/features" rel="nofollow">https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/features</a>
>Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (“SPICE”)<p>Now that's a <i>nice</i> acronym! I think Amazon have skilled people in charge of marketing. They make their announcements feel exciting but not too "markety".
I really like <a href="http://www.manifestinsights.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.manifestinsights.com/</a> for visualizing data.