Amazon Athena

An interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in S3 using standard SQL.

Features

Athena is serverless.
Has a built-in query editor.
Uses Presto, an open source, distributed SQL query engine optimized for low latency, ad hoc analysis of data.
Athena supports a wide variety of data formats such as CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, or Parquet.
Athena automatically executes queries in parallel, so that you get query results in seconds, even on large datasets.
Athena uses Amazon S3 as its underlying data store, making your data highly available and durable.
Athena integrates with Amazon QuickSight for easy data visualization.
Athena integrates out-of-the-box with AWS Glue.

Athena uses a managed Data Catalog to store information and schemas about the databases and tables that you create for your data stored in S3.

Partitioning

By partitioning your data, you can restrict the amount of data scanned by each query, thus improving performance and reducing cost.
Athena leverages Hive for partitioning data.
You can partition your data by any key.

Queries

You can query geospatial data.
You can query different kinds of logs as your datasets.
Athena stores query results in S3.
Athena retains query history for 45 days.
Athena does not support user-defined functions, INSERT INTO statements, and stored procedures.
Athena supports both simple data types such as INTEGER, DOUBLE, VARCHAR and complex data types such as MAPS, ARRAY and STRUCT.

Security

Control access to your data by using IAM policies, access control lists, and S3 bucket policies.
If the files in the target S3 bucket is encrypted, you can perform queries on the encrypted data itself.

Pricing

You pay only for the queries that you run. You are charged based on the amount of data scanned by each query.
You are not charged for failed queries.
You can get significant cost savings and performance gains by compressing, partitioning, or converting your data to a columnar format, because each of those operations reduces the amount of data that Athena needs to scan to execute a query.

Sources:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/
https://aws.amazon.com/athena/features
https://aws.amazon.com/athena/pricing
https://aws.amazon.com/athena/faqs

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