# SPICE-only features
<a name="spice-only-features"></a>

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 | 
| --- | --- | 
|  + Append<br />+ Aggregate<br />+ Pivot<br />+ Unpivot  |  + Divergence  | 

**Features available in both SPICE and DirectQuery**


| Steps | Other capabilities | 
| --- | --- | 
|  + Input<br />+ Add Calculated Columns<br />+ Change Data Type<br />+ Rename Columns<br />+ Select Columns<br />+ Filter<br />+ Join  |  + Composite Datasets  | 

**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.