Amazon Athena


Amazon Athena

  • What it is: Serverless SQL on S3.

  • How it works: You leave your data in S3 (cheap storage) and use Athena to run SQL queries directly on the files (CSV, JSON, Parquet). There is no "database" to manage. You pay per query.

  • Data Engineer Note: This is essentially "Presto as a Service." It is amazing for quick checks but not for powering a dashboard (it can be slow/expensive for heavy concurrent use).

  • Equivalents:

    • GCP: BigQuery (specifically querying data in GCS)

    • Azure: Azure Synapse Serverless SQL Pool


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