Reviewing Amazon Athena's APIs
One of the features that make Amazon Athena so powerful is the fact that it uses SQL as the access language. You can connect to Amazon Athena using a JDBC driver. JDBC driver technology has been around for decades and is the gold standard when it comes to accessing SQL data sources. With Amazon Athena, any set of files stored in Amazon S3 becomes a de facto database.
Additionally, with Amazon Athena Federated Query, you can use the same SQL language to combine disparate data sources and perform joins between heterogeneous repositories, for example, a join between an Oracle table and a JSON file stored in an S3 bucket. The fact that these tables are not of the same type will be transparent to Amazon Athena users and they will all look the same to them in the AWS Glue Data Catalog, which Amazon Athena uses.
