What are UDFs?

If it wasn't already obvious before now, it has probably become pretty clear by this point that the world of big data analytics is vast and complex. Athena offers a very wide array of built-in functionality that enables you to analyze your data, but as your use cases grow, you may find that certain situations are not covered. Perhaps your data has a special encoding that can't be converted by Athena, or maybe you want to do some natural language processing to look for general sentiment in some free text fields. Whatever the situation may be, you can turn to user-defined functions (UDFs) to solve them. UDFs allow us, as users of Athena, to provide custom query behavior that can be used within the queries we are running.

UDFs are not a new concept created by Athena, so if you've been in the data analytics space for a while, you've likely already encountered them. The case of Athena is a bit more unique since you are not managing the query execution...