Since QuickSight can directly query S3, when would we need to use Athena as data source for QuickSight? [closed]

Question

May be I am missing something but I am not able to understand what benefit I will get if I connect Athena with QuickSight instead of connecting QuickSight directly with S3. Please help me to understand this.

Answer 1

Amazon S3 is an object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data. Basically, it has some raw data or unstructured data (in certain file format .csv or .tsv).

Amazon Athena uses a managed Data Catalog to store information and schemas about the databases and tables that you create for your data stored in Amazon S3. So, Athena knows about the data and its structure (i.e. some schema) in S3.

Also, QuickSight can directly connect to the Athena database and query the data for analysis. When you connect to Athena database, you are most likely to handle structured or semi-structured data.

Amazon S3 Manifest Files are not required when the data source is Amazon Athena.

Some limitations while connecting to S3 directly:-

No file specified in the manifest can exceed 1 GB in size, the total size of the all the files specified can't exceed 10 GB, and the total number of files specified can't exceed 1000.

The above limitations are not available when you use create the Data Set Using Amazon Athena Data.

Another Feature when creating a Data Set Using Amazon Athena Data :-

You can directly analyze the data without loading or load into SPICE and analyze the data.

Conclusion:-

If you have not done anything on your S3 files, you can just ahead and use QuickSight using S3 as data set.

In case, if you have loaded the S3 data into Athena, then you can use Athena as data set for QuickSight.

By using the Athena or any other data source, you will get few benefits and can overcome some limitation (i.e. file size) mentioned above.