Integrating Unstructured Data into Amazon QuickSight with Amazon Q Business

Introduction

Amazon QuickSight is a business intelligence (BI) platform that provides a wide array of data analysis and visualization tools.

One of its standout features is Amazon Q, a natural language-driven capability that empowers data analysts and business users to derive actionable insights quickly. Amazon Q allows users to ask and answer questions beyond the confines of dashboards through data Q&A and create narrative documents and slides using data-driven stories. Leveraging existing enterprise data within Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Q ensures adherence to organizational data governance and security policies.

Amazon Q Business further enhances this by serving as an AI-powered enterprise assistant, helping users uncover and summarize insights from unstructured data sources like document management systems, internal websites, and business applications. This new integration enables users to seamlessly incorporate insights from unstructured data into Amazon QuickSight, enriching data Q&A responses and generative story narratives for a more comprehensive understanding of their business.

In this article, we explore using this innovative feature to effectively integrate structured and unstructured data in Amazon QuickSight.

Solution Overview

Key capabilities of this integration include:

1. Enhanced Q&A with Amazon Q Business: Amazon Q in Amazon QuickSight now includes summarized insights from Amazon Q Business as part of multi-visual answers, providing additional business context.
2. Enriched Data Stories: While creating data stories in Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Q automatically incorporates insights from unstructured data sources through Amazon Q Business. Users can also upload documents for added narrative context, generating more tailored and comprehensive narratives.
3. Transparency: Both data Q&A and data stories include links to unstructured source materials, allowing users to verify the origins of insights and build confidence in the results.

The following sections detail how these features work and provide step-by-step guidance for implementation.

Prerequisites

To get started, you will need:

• An AWS account.
• Amazon QuickSight accounts with at least one Admin Pro user.
• A QuickSight dataset connected to a relational data source or a structured data file uploaded as a dataset. (Refer to Creating Dataset for details.)
• Amazon QuickSight topic was created from the dataset. (Refer to Creating Amazon QuickSight Q topics for guidance.)
• A QuickSight dashboard was built using the dataset. (Refer to Building your first dashboard for instructions.)
• A collection of documents (e.g., PDFs or Word files) containing unstructured data relevant to the analysis in Amazon QuickSight.

Setting Up Amazon Q Business in Amazon QuickSight

1. Create an Amazon Q Business Application
   • Log in to the Amazon QuickSight console and select Manage Amazon QuickSight from the dropdown menu.
   • Navigate to Security & Permissions, then choose Manage.
   • Select Amazon Q Business, pick your preferred AWS Region, and choose Create.

• Enter a name for your new application (e.g., “New_QuickSight_application”) and click Done.

2. Configure the Amazon Q Business Application

• • The newly created application will open in the Amazon Q Business console.
  • Navigate to Data Sources and select Retriever.
  • Choose Native for Retrievers and select Enterprise or Starter for Index Provisioning based on your use case. Click Confirm.
  • Amazon Q Business will create its index where you can upload or sync documents. To add data:
    • Select Add Data Source and choose Upload Files or a connector for your data repository.

• Upload relevant files (e.g., “Coffee Growth Plan for 2025” or “Coffee Sales”) and click Upload.

• Wait for the index creation process to complete. Refresh the page to check the status.

Querying Structured and Unstructured Data with Amazon Q

For demonstration purposes, consider the Amazon QuickSight topic “Coffee Sales,” created using an Excel file containing sales data by customer, product, and region.

1. Enable the option to allow insight summaries from Amazon Q Business in Q&A on the topic details page.
2. Use Amazon Q in Amazon QuickSight to query data. For example, type “bottom performing products.” In the left pane, an additional Insights from Q Business section will display insights derived from the uploaded documents indexed in Amazon Q Business.

Integrating Unstructured Data into Data Stories

Amazon QuickSight dashboards, such as those created for coffee sales data, can now incorporate unstructured data insights into stories. Here’s how:

1. Select your dashboard and initiate story creation.
2. Upload relevant documents or links to company repositories integrated with Amazon Q Business.
3. Insights from structured data in Amazon QuickSight and unstructured data in Amazon Q Business will automatically populate the story, creating enriched narratives tailored to your data.

Conclusion

This integration between Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Q Business marks a significant step forward in combining structured and unstructured data for comprehensive business intelligence. Users can now:

• Enrich Amazon QuickSight Q&A with insights from unstructured documents.
• Create dynamic data stories that include structured and unstructured data insights.
• Access transparent, source-linked insights to enhance trust and usability.

This feature is available to all Amazon Q Business Pro users. We encourage you to explore this powerful capability and share your feedback and experiences in the comments section.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding Amazon QuickSight and we will get back to you quickly.

About CloudThat

CloudThat is a leading provider of Cloud Training and Consulting services with a global presence in India, the USA, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Specializing in AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, VMware, Databricks, and more, the company serves mid-market and enterprise clients, offering comprehensive expertise in Cloud Migration, Data Platforms, DevOps, IoT, AI/ML, and more.

CloudThat is the first Indian Company to win the prestigious Microsoft Partner 2024 Award and is recognized as a top-tier partner with AWS and Microsoft, including the prestigious ‘Think Big’ partner award from AWS and the Microsoft Superstars FY 2023 award in Asia & India. Having trained 650k+ professionals in 500+ cloud certifications and completed 300+ consulting projects globally, CloudThat is an official AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS Training Partner, AWS Migration Partner, AWS Data and Analytics Partner, AWS DevOps Competency Partner, AWS GenAI Competency Partner, Amazon QuickSight Service Delivery Partner, Amazon EKS Service Delivery Partner,  AWS Microsoft Workload Partners, Amazon EC2 Service Delivery Partner, Amazon ECS Service Delivery Partner, AWS Glue Service Delivery Partner, Amazon Redshift Service Delivery Partner, AWS Control Tower Service Delivery Partner, AWS WAF Service Delivery Partner, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon OpenSearch, AWS DMS and many more.