Chapter 7: Ad Hoc Analytics

Welcome to Part 3 of Serverless Analytics with Amazon Athena! In the preceding chapters, you learned how to run basic Athena queries and established an understanding of key Athena concepts. You then connected to a data lake that you built and secured. Along the way, you've been learning how to organize and model your data for use by Athena. Now that you have much of the prerequisite knowledge for using Athena, we once again shift our focus. The next few chapters will revisit many of the concepts you've already learned as you work through four of the most common use cases that lead customers to choose Athena for their business.

We begin right here, in this chapter, by unraveling both what it means to run ad hoc analytics queries as well as why the industry seems to have an insatiable appetite for running such queries. We'll also go through building a template for how you can adopt Athena and its related tooling within your organization...