AWS 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.
With Amazon Athena, there is no infrastructure to set up or manage, and the customer pays only for the queries they run. Amazon Athena scales automatically, executing queries in parallel, which gives fast results, even with a large dataset and complex queries.
To get started, just log into the Athena Management Console, define your schema, and start querying. Amazon Athena uses Presto with full standard SQL support and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Apache Parquet and Avro. While Amazon Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying and integrates with Amazon QuickSight for easy visualization, it can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays.
Amazon Athena can be accessed via the AWS Management Console, an API, or an ODBC or JDBC driver. You can programmatically run queries, add tables or partitions using the ODBC or JDBC driver.
- Serverless service to perform analytics directly against S3 files
- Uses SQL language to query the files
- Has a JDBC / ODBC driver
- Charged per query and amount of data scanned
- Supports CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet (built on Presto)
- Use cases: Business intelligence / analytics / reporting, analyze & query VPC Flow Logs, ELB Logs, CloudTrail trails, etc…
- Exam Tip: Analyze data directly on S3 => use Athena
Features Of AWS Athena:
Athena has many features that makes it suitable for Data Analysis. Let’s take a look at the different features one by one.
Easy Implementation: Athena doesn’t require installation. It can be accessed directly from the AWS Console also directly by AWS CLI.
Serverless: It is serverless, so the end-user doesn’t need to worry about infrastructure, configuration, scaling or failure. Athena takes care of everything on its own.
Pay per query: Athena charges you only for the query you run, i.e. the amount of data that is managed per query. You can save a lot if you can compress them and format your dataset accordingly.
Fast: Athena is a very fast analytics tool. It can perform complex queries in less time by breaking the complex queries into simpler ones and run them parallelly, then combine the results to give the desired output.
Secure: With the help of IAM policies and AWS Identity, Athena gives you complete control over the data set. As the data is stored in S3 buckets, IAM policies can help you manage control to users.
Highly available: With the assurance of AWS, Athena is highly available and the user can execute queries round the clock. As AWS is 99.999% available, so is Athena.
Integration: The best feature of Athena is that it can be integrated with AWS Glue. AWS Glue will help the user to create a better-unified data repository. This helps you create better versioning of data, better tables, views, etc.
Happy Learning !!
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