Introducing Amazon Athena: a pay-as-you-go interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL
Today, we announced the general availability of Amazon Athena, a serverless query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. With Athena, there are no clusters to manage and tune, there is no infrastructure to setup, and customers pay only for the queries they run. Athena scales automatically – executing queries in parallel – so results are fast, even with large datasets and complex queries.
Amazon Athena uses Presto with full standard SQL support and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet. You can use the AWS Management console to run queries on Athena or the SQL client of your choice using Athena’s JDBC driver. Athena integrates with Amazon QuickSight for easy data visualization. Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying but can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays. Since Athena uses Amazon S3 as the underlying data store, it is highly available and durable with data redundantly stored across multiple facilities and multiple devices in each facility.
With Amazon Athena, you only pay for the queries that you run. You are charged based on the amount of data scanned per query. You can get significant cost savings and performance gains by compressing, partitioning, or converting your data to a columnar format, because each of those operations reduces the amount of data that Athena needs to scan to execute a query.
Amazon Athena is available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions, and will expand to additional regions in the coming months. To get started with Athena, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/athena.