# SPICE-only features


Amazon Quick Sight's SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) enables certain computationally intensive data preparation features. These transformations are materialized in SPICE for optimal performance, rather than being executed at query time.

**SPICE-only features**


| Steps | Other capabilities | 
| --- | --- | 
|  [\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/quick/latest/userguide/spice-only-features.html)  |  [\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/quick/latest/userguide/spice-only-features.html)  | 

**Features available in both SPICE and DirectQuery**


| Steps | Other capabilities | 
| --- | --- | 
|  [\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/quick/latest/userguide/spice-only-features.html)  |  [\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/quick/latest/userguide/spice-only-features.html)  | 

**Best practices**
+ Use SPICE for workflows requiring SPICE-only features.
+ Choose SPICE to optimize performance for complex transformations and large datasets.
+ Consider DirectQuery for real-time data needs when SPICE-only features are not required.