Analysis and visualization

After processing the data and making it available for further analysis, you need the right tools to analyze and visualize the processed data.

In many cases, you can perform data analysis using the same tools you use for processing data. You can use tools such as MySQL Workbench to analyze your data in Amazon Redshift with ANSI SQL. Amazon Redshift also works well with popular third-party BI solutions available on the market, such as Tableau and MicroStrategy.

Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered BI service that enables you to create visualizations, perform analysis as needed, and quickly get business insights from your data. Amazon QuickSight offers native integration with AWS data sources such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS. Amazon Redshift sources can be auto-detected by Amazon QuickSight, and can be queried either using a direct query or SPICE mode. SPICE is the in-memory optimized calculation engine for Amazon QuickSight, designed specifically for fast, as-needed data visualization. You can improve the performance of database datasets by importing the data into SPICE instead of using a direct query to the database.

If you are using Amazon S3 as your primary storage, you can use Amazon Athena/QuickSight integration to perform analysis and visualization. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in S3 using standard SQL. You can run SQL queries using Athena on data stored in S3, and build business dashboards within QuickSight.

For another visualization approach, Apache Zeppelin is an open-source BI solution that you can run on Amazon EMR to visualize data in Amazon S3 using Spark SQL. You can also use Apache Zeppelin to visualize data in Amazon Redshift.