Description

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using standard SQL. It’s serverless, meaning there’s no infrastructure to set up or manage, allowing you to focus on analyzing your data rather than managing infrastructure.

How it Works

With a few actions in the AWS Management Console, you can point Athena at your data stored in Amazon S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is built on open-source Trino and Presto engines and Apache Spark frameworks, with no provisioning or configuration effort required.

Benefits

• Serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage.
• Allows for ad-hoc querying using standard SQL.
• Scales automatically, executing queries in parallel for fast results.
• Supports a wide variety of data formats such as CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, or Parquet.
• Provides a simplified, flexible way to analyze petabytes of data.

Limitations

• Optimization is limited to queries.
• No indexing options.
• The maximum allowed query string length is 262144 bytes.
• The maximum number of partitions you can create with CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS) statements is 100.
• Stored procedures are not supported.

Features

• Serverless, interactive analytics service built on open-source frameworks.
• Supports open-table and file formats.
• Provides a simplified, flexible way to analyze petabytes of data.