Amazon Athena

In simple terms, Amazon Athena is nothing but an interactive query service that is serverless. It makes use of standard SQL to analyze data in Amazon S3. It allows you to quickly query structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data that is stored in S3. With Athena, you don't need to load any datasets locally or write any complex ETLs (Extracts, Transforms, and Loads) as it provides the capability to read data directly from S3.

Note

ETL is a popular concept from the data warehouse world, where three separate functions are used to prepare data for data analysis. The term extract refers to data extraction from the source dataset, transform refers to data transformation (if required), and load refers to data loading in the final tables, which will be used for data analysis.

The Amazon Athena service uses Presto technology. Presto is a distributed SQL query engine that is open source. Presto provides a SQL-like dialect for querying data and is designed to...