AWS Big Data Blog Month in Review: April 2017

Another month of big data solutions on the Big Data Blog. Please take a look at our summaries below and learn, comment, and share. Thank you for reading!

NEW POSTS

Amazon QuickSight Spring Announcement: KPI Charts, Export to CSV, AD Connector, and More! 
In this blog post, we share a number of new features and enhancements in Amazon Quicksight. You can now create key performance indicator (KPI) charts, define custom ranges when importing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, export data to comma separated value (CSV) format, and create aggregate filters for SPICE data sets. In the Enterprise Edition, we added an additional option to connect to your on-premises Active Directory using AD Connector. 

Securely Analyze Data from Another AWS Account with EMRFS
Sometimes, data to be analyzed is spread across buckets owned by different accounts. In order to ensure data security, appropriate credentials management needs to be in place. This is especially true for large enterprises storing data in different Amazon S3 buckets for different departments. This post shows how you can use a custom credentials provider to access S3 objects that cannot be accessed by the default credentials provider of EMRFS.

Querying OpenStreetMap with Amazon Athena
This post explains how anyone can use Amazon Athena to quickly query publicly available OSM data stored in Amazon S3 (updated weekly) as an AWS Public Dataset. Imagine that you work for an NGO interested in improving knowledge of and access to health centers in Africa. You might want to know what’s already been mapped, to facilitate the production of maps of surrounding villages, and to determine where infrastructure investments are likely to be most effective.

Build a Real-time Stream Processing Pipeline with Apache Flink on AWS
This post outlines a reference architecture for a consistent, scalable, and reliable stream processing pipeline that is based on Apache Flink using Amazon EMR, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon OpenSearch Service. An AWSLabs GitHub repository provides the artifacts that are required to explore the reference architecture in action. Resources include a producer application that ingests sample data into an Amazon Kinesis stream and a Flink program that analyses the data in real time and sends the result to Amazon OpenSearch Service for visualization.

Manage Query Workloads with Query Monitoring Rules in Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a powerful, fully managed data warehouse that can offer significantly increased performance and lower cost in the cloud. However, queries which hog cluster resources (rogue queries) can affect your experience. In this post, you learn how query monitoring rules can help spot and act against such queries. This, in turn, can help you to perform smooth business operations in supporting mixed workloads to maximize cluster performance and throughput.

Amazon QuickSight Now Supports Audit Logging with AWS CloudTrail
In this post, we announce support for AWS CloudTrail in Amazon QuickSight, which allows logging of QuickSight events across an AWS account. Whether you have an enterprise setting or a small team scenario, this integration will allow QuickSight administrators to accurately answer questions such as who last changed an analysis, or who has connected to sensitive data. With CloudTrail, administrators have better governance, auditing and risk management of their QuickSight usage.

Near Zero Downtime Migration from MySQL to DynamoDB
This post introduces two methods of seamlessly migrating data from MySQL to DynamoDB, minimizing downtime and converting the MySQL key design into one more suitable for NoSQL.

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