Federating the queries of external data sources with Amazon Athena Query Federation

As we've discussed several times in this book, Athena lets you query data that has been loaded into the data lake using standard SQL semantics. But since the launch of Athena, AWS has added additional functionality to enhance Athena to make it an even more powerful query engine.

One of those major enhancements, which became available in 2021 with Athena query engine v2, was the ability to run federated queries, which we will look at next.

Querying external data sources using Athena Federated Query

Query federation, also sometimes referred to as data virtualization, is the process of querying multiple external data sources, in different database engines or other systems, through a single SQL query statement. In November 2019, AWS announced the preview of Federated Query in Amazon Athena, which enables a single Athena query to query data in data lakes, as well as data from external sources...