Amazon Athena

What Amazon Athena is

Amazon Athena is a serverless cloud service for interactive SQL analysis of data in Amazon S3. It can also query sources across other clouds and on-premises environments, and scales execution automatically while running queries in parallel. Its SQL engine is based on Trino and Presto and supports ANSI SQL features such as large joins, window functions, and arrays. Supported formats include CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet. Users can submit queries through the console, API, CLI, AWS SDK, or supported BI and SQL development tools using JDBC or ODBC. Athena integrates with AWS Glue and provides connectors to 30 data stores. SQL queries can invoke models deployed on Amazon SageMaker for inference. Workgroups can separate workloads, impose processing limits, and track costs; access controls include IAM policies, access control lists, and S3 bucket policies. Listed SQL query pricing is $5 a month, billed at $5 per TB scanned; additional S3, Glue Data Catalog, and Lambda charges may apply. S3 storage, requests, and transfers also have standard S3 charges. AWS was incorporated in 1994 and lists its principal corporate offices in Seattle, Washington.

Who it suits

Athena suits people exploring or querying data in S3 with SQL, including teams connecting other cloud and on-premises sources. Workgroups and access controls may help organize queries and govern data access.

Limits

SQL queries are billed at $5.00 per TB of data scanned, while Capacity Reservations cost $0.30 per DPU-hour and Apache Spark costs $0.35 per DPU-hour. S3 storage, requests, transfer, Glue Data Catalog, and other applicable service charges can add to usage costs.

Getting started

1. Open the Athena website and AWS console
2. Prepare data in Amazon S3 or connect another supported source
3. Choose the web console, API, CLI, SDK, or JDBC/ODBC application
4. Select SQL queries, capacity reservations, or Apache Spark usage
5. Configure workgroups, access policies, and processing limits
6. Run queries against supported formats and sources

Verdict

Athena offers several ways to submit SQL queries and supports a broad set of data formats and connectors. Account for scanned-data pricing and separate storage, catalog, and related service charges when estimating use.