Query structured data from Amazon Q Business using Amazon QuickSight integration

Amazon Q Business is an AI-powered generative assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on the data and information in your enterprise systems. Generative AI is driving breakthrough innovation, but companies still struggle with enterprise knowledge, especially when it comes to unstructured content (e.g. PDFs, Word documents, HTML pages) and structured data (real-time data or databases or data lakes). saved reports). Both categories of data are typically queried and queried using separate tools, from in-product browsing and search capabilities for unstructured data to business intelligence (BI) tools such as Amazon QuickSight for structured content. will be accessed.

Amazon Q Business provides an effective solution for quickly building conversational applications on top of unstructured content. Centralize your enterprise’s knowledge with over 40 data connectors to popular content and storage management systems such as Confluence, SharePoint, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Customers also want a unified conversation experience across all knowledge repositories, regardless of the format in which content is stored and organized.

On December 3, 2024, Amazon Q Business announced the launch of its integration with QuickSight. This enables you to quickly connect structured sources to your Amazon Q Business applications to create a unified conversation experience for your end users. QuickSight integration provides an extensive set of over 20 structured data source connectors, including Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle, to quickly expand the conversational reach of the Amazon Q Business Assistant to a wider range of knowledge sources. Let’s cover it. Answers are returned to end users in real time from structured sources, combined with other relevant information in unstructured repositories. Amazon Q Business uses QuickSight’s analytics and advanced visualization engine to generate accurate, understandable answers from structured sources.

This post shows you how to set up a QuickSight connection from Amazon Q Business to ask questions and get real-time data and visualizations of structured data in addition to unstructured content from QuickSight.

Solution overview

Amazon Q Business QuickSight functionality is available through the Amazon Q Business console and Amazon Q Business API. This functionality is implemented as a plugin within Amazon Q Business. When enabled, this plugin behaves differently than other Amazon Q Business plugins. Automatically query QuickSight for all user prompts and find relevant answers.

For AWS accounts that are not yet subscribed to QuickSight, Amazon Q Business administrators perform the following steps.

1. Create a QuickSight account.
2. Connect your database and create a dataset in QuickSight.
3. Create topics in QuickSight and make them searchable from Amazon Q Business applications.

When this feature is activated, Amazon Q Business uses the unstructured data sources configured in Amazon Q Business and the structured content available using QuickSight to include narratives and visualizations. Generate rich answers. Depending on your QuickSight question and data, Amazon Q Business may generate one or more visualizations in response.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites must be met:

• An AWS account where you can follow the steps in this post.
• An AWS IAM identity center configured for use with Amazon Q Business. For more information, see Configuring Amazon Q Business with AWS IAM Identity Center Trusted Identity Propagation.
• At least one Amazon Q Business Pro user with administrator privileges to set up and configure Amazon Q Business. For pricing information, see Amazon Q Business Pricing.
• An IAM Identity Center group that is assigned the QuickSight Admin Pro role for users who manage and configure QuickSight.
• If your QuickSight account exists, it must be in the same AWS account and AWS Region as Amazon Q Business, and it must be configured in IAM Identity Center.
• A database that is installed and accessible from QuickSight to load structured data (or you can create a dataset by uploading a CSV or XLS file). The database also requires credentials to create tables and insert data.
• Sample structured data (along with insert statements) to load into the database.

Create an Amazon Q Business application

This feature requires the Amazon Q Business application. If you don’t have an existing application, create one with an Amazon S3 data source by following the steps in Discover insights from Amazon S3 using the Amazon Q S3 connector. Upload unstructured documents to Amazon S3 and synchronize data sources.

Create and configure a new QuickSight account

If you have an existing QuickSight account, you can skip this section. To create a QuickSight account, follow these steps:

1. In the Amazon Q Business console, navigate to your application.
2. choose amazon quick site in the navigation pane.

3. choose Create a QuickSight account.

4. under QuickSight account informationenter your account name and account notification email address.
5. under Assign QuickSight Admin Pro rolesselect the IAM Identity Center group that you created as a prerequisite.
6. choose Next.

7. under service accessselect Create and use a new service role.
8. choose approve.

This creates a QuickSight account, assigns the IAM Identity Center group as QuickSight Admin Pro, and authorizes Amazon Q Business to access QuickSight.

A dashboard with QuickSight details appears. Datasets and topics are not displayed at this time.

9. choose Go to quick site.

You can proceed to the next section to prepare your data.

Configure an existing QuickSight account

If you followed the previous steps to create a new QuickSight account, you can skip this section.

If your current QuickSight account is not in IAM Identity Center, consider using another AWS account without a QuickSight subscription to test this feature. From that account, create an Amazon Q Business application in IAM Identity Center and run the QuickSight integration setup steps in the Amazon Q Business console to create a QuickSight account in IAM Identity Center. To avoid further charges, remember to delete your new QuickSight account and Amazon Q Business application after you complete your testing.

To set up the QuickSight connector from Amazon Q Business for an existing QuickSight account, follow these steps.

1. In the Amazon Q Business console, navigate to your application.
2. choose amazon quick site in the navigation pane.

3. choose Approve QuickSight answers.

4. under Assign QuickSight Admin Pro rolesselect the IAM Identity Center group that you created as a prerequisite.
5. under service accessselect Create and use a new service role.
6. choose keep.

A dashboard with QuickSight details appears. If you already have datasets and topics, they will appear here.

Now you’re ready to add datasets and topics in the next section.

Add data to QuickSight

In this section, you create an Amazon Redshift data source. Instead, you can create a data source from a database of your choice, use a file in Amazon S3, or perform a direct CSV file upload to connect to it. For more information, see Create a Dataset from a Database.

To configure your data, follow these steps:

1. Create a new dataset using Amazon Redshift as a data source.

There are multiple options for configuring this connection. Choose the one that best suits your needs.

2. Create topics from datasets. For more information, see Create topics.

3. Create dashboards from topics as needed. Once created, it is available for use in Amazon Q Business.

Contact Amazon Q Business

To start chatting with Amazon Q Business, follow these steps:

1. In the Amazon Q Business console, navigate to your application.
2. choose amazon quick site in the navigation pane.

You will see that the dataset and topic are populated.

3. Please select a link below Deployed URL.

I used Amazon Redshift to upload AWS cost and usage reports for a specific AWS account to QuickSight. You also used Amazon S3 to upload documents from Amazon services to Amazon Q Business as unstructured data in your data source. Ask questions related to AWS costs and show how Amazon Q Business answers questions from both structured and unstructured data.

The following screenshot shows an example of a question that returns responses from unstructured data only.

The following screenshot shows an example of a question that returns a response from structured data only.

The following screenshot shows an example question that returns responses from both structured and unstructured data.

The following screenshot shows an example question that returns multiple visualizations from both structured and unstructured data.

cleaning

If you no longer want to use this Amazon Q Business feature, delete the resources you created to avoid future charges.

1. Delete the Amazon Q Business application.
   1. In the Amazon Q Business console, choose: application in the navigation pane.
   2. Select the application and action menu, selection erase.
   3. Type “delete” to confirm and select erase.

This process may take up to 15 minutes to complete.

2. Delete an S3 bucket.
   1. Empty your S3 bucket.
   2. Delete the bucket.
3. Delete your QuickSight account.
   1. In the Amazon QuickSight console, Manage Amazon QuickSight.
   2. choose account settings and management.
   3. Delete your account.
4. Delete your IAM Identity Center instance.

conclusion

In this post, you learned how to include answers from structured sources in your Amazon Q Business application using QuickSight integration. This provides end users with a unified conversation experience that increases productivity by saving time and helping them make better decisions through more complete answers.

At AWS re:Invent 2024, we also announced a similar integration experience that enables QuickSight with Amazon Q Business to access insights from Amazon Q’s unstructured data sources.

To learn about new features offered by Amazon Q for QuickSight, see QuickSight Plugins.

For more information about Amazon Q Business, see the Amazon Q Business User Guide.

For more information about configuring QuickSight datasets, see Manage Amazon QuickSight Datasets More Efficiently Using the New User Interface.

QuickSight also allows you to query unstructured data. For more information, see Integrate Unstructured Data into Amazon QuickSight using Amazon Q Business.

About the author

Jiten Dedia He is a senior AIML solutions architect with over 20 years of experience in the software industry. He has assisted Fortune 500 companies with their AIML/Generative AI needs.

Jean-Pierre Dodel He is the Principal Product Manager for Amazon Q Business and is responsible for delivering key strategic product capabilities, including structured data support for RAG’s Q Business. and overall product accuracy optimization. He has been a product leader at AWS for over 7 years and brings extensive experience in AI/ML and enterprise search to the team.