What Is Amazon Athena?
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
Athena is easy to use. Simply point to your data in Amazon S3, define the schema, and start querying using standard SQL. Most results are delivered within seconds. With Athena, there’s no need for complex ETL jobs to prepare your data for analysis. This makes it easy for anyone with SQL skills to quickly analyze large-scale datasets.
Athena is out-of-the-box integrated with AWS Glue Data Catalog, allowing you to create a unified metadata repository across various services, crawl data sources to discover schemas and populate your Catalog with new and modified table and partition definitions, and maintain schema versioning. You can also use Glue’s fully-managed ETL capabilities to transform data or convert it into columnar formats to optimize cost and improve performance.
Start Querying Instantly – Serverless. No ETL.
Athena is serverless. You can quickly query your data without having to setup and manage any servers or data warehouses. Just point to your data in Amazon S3, define the schema, and start querying using the built-in query editor. Amazon Athena allows you to tap into all your data in S3 without the need to set up complex processes to extract, transform, and load the data (ETL).
Pay Per Query – Only pay for data scanned.
With Amazon Athena, you pay only for the queries that you run. You are charged $5 per terabyte scanned by your queries. You can save from 30% to 90% on your per-query costs and get better performance by compressing, partitioning, and converting your data into columnar formats. Athena queries data directly in Amazon S3. There are no additional storage charges beyond S3.
Open. Powerful. Standard – Built on Presto. Runs standard SQL.
Amazon Athena uses Presto with ANSI SQL support and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet. Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying but it can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays. Amazon Athena is highly available; and executes queries using compute resources across multiple facilities and multiple devices in each facility. Amazon Athena uses Amazon S3 as its underlying data store, making your data highly available and durable.
