Summary

In this chapter, we formalized your introduction to Athena by going over the service's high-level capabilities, including ACID transactions, federation, ETL operations such as CTAS, and open source file formats. We went inside Athena by learning more about Presto, the open source distributed SQL engine that sits at its core. As part of that exercise, we experimented with supporting our own multi-tenant analytics infrastructure. This allowed us to see all the value-added functionality that sets Athena apart from other serverless technologies that fall short of being fully managed. As if that wasn't enough of a reason to hop on the serverless analytics bandwagon, we unpacked the marketing hype to find that Athena's $5/TB price tag is significantly cheaper than many of its competitors who also claim to charge $5/TB, but count the uncompressed bytes!

We also learned that performance is personal and that we'd have to test our access patterns and data models...