Determining when to use Amazon Athena
There is no one answer to this question. There are use cases for which Athena is ideally suited and situations where other tools would be a better choice. Most potential applications of Athena lie in the gradient between these two extremes. This section will describe several common and recommended usages of Athena to help you decide when the right time is for you to use Athena.
Ad hoc analytics
We might as well kick off this discussion with one of Athena's greatest hits – ad hoc analytics. Many customers first notice Athena for its ease of use and flexibility, two key features when you suddenly need to have an unplanned conversation with your data. We saw this firsthand in Chapter 1, Your First Query, when it took us just a few minutes to load up the NYC Taxi trip dataset and start finding relevant business insights. Ad hoc analytics can be used to describe unplanned queries, reports, or research into your data for which a pre...