Amazon Athena

• Serverless query service to perform analytics against S3 objects
• Uses standard SQL language to query the files
• Supports CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet (built on Presto)
• Pricing: $5.00 per TB of data scanned
• Use compressed or columnar data for cost-savings (less scan)
• Use cases: Business intelligence / analytics / reporting, analyze & query VPC Flow Logs, ELB Logs, CloudTrail trails, etc...
• Exam Tip: analyze data in S3 using serverless SQL, use Athena

Amazon Athena – Performance Improvement

• Use columnar data for cost-savings (less scan)
  • Apache Parquet or ORC is recommended
  • Huge performance improvement
  • Use Glue to convert your data to Parquet or ORC
• Compress data for smaller retrievals (bzip2, gzip, lz4, snappy, zlip, zstd…)
• Partition datasets in S3 for easy querying on virtual columns
  • s3://yourBucket/pathToTable

/<PARTITION_COLUMN_NAME>=<VALUE>
/<PARTITION_COLUMN_NAME>=<VALUE>
/<PARTITION_COLUMN_NAME>=<VALUE>
/etc

• Example: s3://athena-examples/flight/parquet/year=1991/month=1/day=1/
• Use larger files (> 128 MB) to minimize overhead

Federated Query

• Allows you to run SQL queries across data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources (AWS or on-premises)
• Uses Data Source Connectors that run on AWS Lambda to run Federated Queries (e.g., CloudWatch Logs, DynamoDB, RDS, …)
• Store the results back in Amazon S3