Resources, Guides and Best Practices

Amazon Athena

Learn everything you need to get started with Amazon Athena, or discover new best practices that can help you improve performance and reduce costs. Browse through our library of blogs, ebooks, webinars and videos to find answers to your most pressing questions about Athena and the related ecosystem.

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What is Amazon Athena?

Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that reads data directly from Amazon S3 object storage. It is based on the open-source Apache Presto, but offered exclusively as a managed service by Amazon Web Services. Athena allows you to analyze very high volumes of data using ANSI-SQL, without the need to manage infrastructure.

Unlike a traditional database, Athena doesn’t store data in rest – storage is done entirely on S3, while the compute resources needed to return results for a query are provisioned automatically by AWS. Pricing follows a similar logic and based on terabytes of data scanned ($5 per terabyte).

What are the benefits of Amazon Athena?

Less reliance on IT: Running Athena does not require users to monitor infrastructure, spin up additional clusters or manually provision resources, making it simpler to get started.
Open architecture: Athena supports commonly-used open source formats such as JSON, CSV and Apache Parquet, which reduces vendor lock-in and enables users to employ additional querying and analytics tools as needed.
Decoupled storage and compute: Since Athena utilizes Amazon S3 for data storage, costs are exponentially lower compared to storing the same amounts of data in a coupled database. This allows organizations to store exponentially higher volumes of data without incurring significant additional costs.
SQL-based: SQL is the language of choice for most data analysts and DBAs, and is simpler to work with compared to Python or Scala. Athena queries are written in regular ANSI-SQL, which makes it accessible by almost every data professional or developer.

What are the different use cases for Amazon Athena?

Generally speaking, Athena can be relevant whenever you want to query data stored on Amazon S3. Common scenarios include:

Streaming analytics: Querying and visualizing streaming sources such as web click-streams in real time, or near-real time.
Ad-hoc analytics on big data: Quickly answering a specific question that requires you to scan terabytes of data, without setting up infrastructure.
Redshift cost reduction: While Redshift ensures very high performance, it is a coupled database which can become costly and complex to operate at higher scales; in these cases, Athena and S3 storage can be used to reduce some of the operational cost of Redshift.

You can learn more about Athena use cases here.

Benchmarks and comparisons

[Blog] Benchmarking Athena and BigQuery – Performance and Price: We ran a series of SQL queries against the same dataset in Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery, and measured the time it took to return query results as well as the costs. We also tested the impact of data preparation. Read more
[Blog] Deciding between Athena and Redshift: We look at typical use cases for these two popular AWS tools and attempt to give a few high-level guidelines to decide which of the two you should use. Read more Read more

Analyzing streaming data in Athena

Streaming data is challenging in unique ways. See how to build efficient data pipelines that enable you to query event streams in Athena:

[Blog] ETL your Kinesis Data to Athena with UpSQL: In this step-by-step guide, we demonstrate how you can use UpSQL to ingest data from Kinesis to S3 and create a structured table in Athena using only regular SQL. Read more
[Blog] Data Architecture for AWS Athena: 6 Examples to Learn From Amazon Athena is a powerful tool for querying data. In this article, we dive into examples of how to incorporate Athena in different data architectures. Read more
[Blog] How (and Why) to Analyze CloudWatch Logs In AWS Athena: This blog post presents a reference architecture and key principles for storing your logs in analytics-ready format on Amazon S3, and then using Amazon Athena to query and analyze the data. Read more
[Video] Kafka to Athena We look at typical use cases for these two popular AWS tools and attempt to give a few high-level guidelines to decide which of the two you should use. Read more Watch now

ETL and Data Preparation for Athena

Athena reads data directly from Amazon S3, and the way data is stored on S3 can have a dramatic impact on how much value you get from Athena. Discover best practices around partitioning, compaction and file formats to learn how to optimize your data for analytic consumption.

[Webinar] ETL for Amazon Athena: ETL for Amazon Athena: Watch this on-demand webinar to learn the essential guidelines and unique characteristics of ETL for Athena – including partitioning, compaction, pre-joining data and more. Watch now
[Blog] 6 Data Preparation Tips for Querying Big Data in Athena: A written and abridged version of the above webinar, if you’re more into text than video. Read more
[Blog] Solving the Problem of Small Files on S3: Learn how merging small JSON files on S3 into larger files can improve query performance, including benchmarks, and discover the best practices for doing so. Read more
[Blog] Custom Partitioning for Embedded Analytics with Athena: In this blog post, we will present a solution for building performant embedded analytics on streaming data using Amazon Athena. Read more

Improving Athena Performance

Check out our handy guides to learn how to make your Athena queries run faster.

[Blog] Partitioning Data on S3 to Improve Performance in Athena: When storing data on an AWS data lake, partitioning is key to ensure optimal query performance. Check out our guide to partitioning strategies to learn how to do it right. Read more
[eBook] Athena Challenges and Best Practices: earn how to avoid common pitfalls, reduce costs and ensure high performance when working with Amazon Athena. Read more Read more
[Blog] Ultimate Guide to Improving Athena Performance: LUnderstand the basics of what drives Athena performance, and typical things to look out for to ensure queries return quickly. Read more