What is Amazon Athena?
Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that runs SQL queries directly on data in Amazon S3. Without infrastructure setup, you can immediately start analyzing data in your data lake.
Athena is based on Presto and supports standard SQL for queries on various data formats.
Core Features
- Serverless: No servers to manage, no clusters to configure
- Standard SQL: ANSI SQL compatible with Presto engine
- Data Format Support: CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC, Avro, and more
- Federated Queries: Queries beyond S3 to RDS, Redshift, and other sources
- Glue Integration: Automatic schema detection with AWS Glue Data Catalog
Typical Use Cases
Log Analysis: Analyze CloudTrail logs, VPC Flow Logs, or application logs in S3 with SQL. Partitioning by date enables fast queries over billions of entries.
Data Lake Analytics: Ad-hoc queries on the data lake without data movement. Analysts can independently explore data without IT support.
BI Integration: Athena as data source for QuickSight, Tableau, or Power BI. Data stays in S3, only query results are transferred.
Benefits
- No infrastructure costs, only pay per TB scanned
- Instant start without cluster provisioning
- Native integration with S3 and Glue Data Catalog
- Scales automatically for any query size
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon Athena: data lake architecture, query optimization, cost management, and BI integration.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Amazon Athena cost?
Athena charges $5 per TB of data scanned. By using compressed and partitioned data in columnar formats like Parquet, you can reduce costs by up to 90%.
Which data formats does Athena support?
CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, Parquet, and many more. Columnar formats like Parquet and ORC are most efficient as only required columns are read.
Do I need to manage servers or clusters?
No. Athena is fully serverless. You run queries, Athena scales automatically. No capacity planning or cluster maintenance required.
How can I optimize Athena costs?
Partition data by frequently filtered columns, use columnar formats like Parquet, compress data, and use Athena Workgroups for query limits.