Amazon Athena – in-place SQL analytics for the data lake

Structured Query Language (SQL) was invented at IBM in the 1970s but has remained an extremely popular language for querying data throughout the decades. Every day, millions of people across the world use SQL directly to explore data in a variety of databases, and many more use applications (whether business applications, mobile applications, or others) that, under the covers, use SQL to query a database.

Over the years, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has created various versions of an ANSI-SQL standard that database vendors can use to build ANSI-SQL-compliant databases. Database vendors often declare that their database is compatible with a large subset of ANSI-SQL, meaning that different database engines support different aspects of the ANSI-SQL standard.

Facebook, the social media network, has very large datasets and complex data analysis requirements and found that existing tools in the Hadoop...