QuickSight

Rationale

QuickSight  is our tool for dashboarding and reporting.

The main reasons why we chose it over other alternatives are:

• It is fast at querying and graphing.
• It is easy to use, with a traditional drag-and-drop structure.
• It follows a pay-what-you-use pricing model.
• It provides email reports with an in-line display and file attachment.
• It handles large tables without truncation.
• It includes advanced visualizations such as box plots and funnels.
• It has flexible filtering.
• It offers row-level security.
• It works well with dbt .

Alternatives

The following alternatives were considered but not chosen for the following reasons:

Grow

• It replicates the data to its own database, making it redundant and slow.
• Its database cannot handle large amounts of data.
• It does truncate tables.
• It is redundant to dbt.

Looker

• dbt makes LookML unnecessary.
• It truncates large tables.
• It requires an annual commitment.

Preset

• It does not work well for non-time series data.
• It requires an annual commitment.

Power BI

• It is not web-based.
• It is not compatible with macOS.

Trevor

• Its flexibility makes it redundant with dbt .
• It struggles with tables in the order of a million rows.

Mode

• It is not designed for building dashboards but for reporting.
• Makes reusability painful.
• Additional capacities, such as Python notebooks, don’t fit our needs.

Usage

We use QuickSight  to create compelling dashboards for internal use (e.g., engineering metrics ).