What is the optimal data source for Amazon QuickSight when needing to create heat maps for visualizing sales data in S3?

When creating heat maps for visualizing sales data that is stored in Amazon S3, using Amazon Athena is the optimal choice because it allows for efficient querying of data stored directly in S3. Athena is a serverless interactive query service that enables users to analyze data in S3 using standard SQL without the need to set up any infrastructure or data warehousing solution like Amazon Redshift.

By utilizing Athena, you can easily create ad-hoc queries against the sales data in S3 and prepare the data for visualization in Amazon QuickSight. This shortens the time from data storage to visualization, enhances flexibility, and allows for seamless integration with QuickSight, which can directly connect to results produced by Athena for creating various types of visualizations, including heat maps.

While other options like Amazon Redshift provide more extensive data warehousing capabilities, they generally involve additional setup and data loading steps that may not be necessary for quick and periodic analysis of data stored in S3. Amazon Glue, on the other hand, serves primarily as a data catalog and ETL service, which means it is useful for data preparation but does not directly participate in visual analysis. Thus, Amazon S3, while serving as the data storage, typically interfaces with Athena to enable visualization, but