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Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena

With Amazon Athena, you can run standard SQL queries to analyze data in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources without an ETL process. This fully managed serverless service can access data hosted on Amazon S3, on-premises, or even in multi-cloud environments.

Core Benefits​

  • Serverless: No infrastructure to set up or manage; you can start querying data instantly.
  • Pay-Per-Query: You are charged only for the queries you run, making it highly cost-effective for ad-hoc analysis.
  • Standard SQL: Uses standard SQL, making it easy for anyone with SQL skills to analyze large datasets.

Role in Data Pipeline​

Data Analysis: Serves as an interactive query engine that allows analysts to directly query raw and transformed data in the data lake (Amazon S3) without needing to load it into a data warehouse.

Use Cases​

  • Ad-Hoc Data Discovery: Quickly running a query to investigate an issue by analyzing raw web server logs stored in S3.
  • Business Reporting: Creating reports by querying structured data (e.g., Parquet files) in the data lake.
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Amazon Athena provides the fastest way to run ad-hoc SQL queries on your data lake, democratizing data access for analysts.

Use case: Ideal for interactive, ad-hoc data analysis directly on S3 and other data sources without managing infrastructure.

Additional Resources​