Understanding Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is an interactive, serverless analytical service that can help to explore data available in Amazon S3 without loading the data. Athena helps to analyze the data through SQL syntax or interactive Spark applications. It can help customers to analyze datasets stored in multiple data formats on Amazon S3 through familiar SQL. Since Athena is a serverless offering, users are charged based on the data scanned by the queries and there is no need to maintain separate servers to enable user queries. This has enabled business and analytics teams to quickly analyze, transform, and visualize data in the data lake for specific use cases without relying on the data engineering team to come up with complex ETL pipelines.
Amazon Athena was launched on re:Invent 2016 and has gone through significant improvements over the course of time. It was launched as a serverless mechanism to query Amazon S3 data using managed Presto servers from the Athena catalog...