What is Presto?

As we have mentioned a few times already, Athena is based on a fork of the Presto open source project. By understanding Presto, what it is, and how it works, we can gain greater insight into Athena.

Presto is a distributed SQL engine designed to provide response times in the order of seconds for interactive data analysis. While it may be tempting to do so, it is essential not to confuse Presto with a database or data warehouse as Presto has no storage of its own. Instead, Presto relies on a suite of connectors to plug in different storage systems such as HDFS, Amazon S3, RDBMS, and many other sources you may wish to analyze. This simple but inventive approach allows Presto to offer the same consistent SQL interface regardless of where your data lives. It's also why Athena claims that "there is no need for complex ETL jobs to prepare your data for analysis."

If you have an existing data lake, you may be familiar with Apache Hive or Hadoop tools...