Amazon Athena Engine Upgrades, Support for Lambda Expressions, and Ability to Skip Headers

Posted on: Jan 19, 2018

Amazon Athena uses Presto, an open source distributed query engine, to run SQL queries against data in Amazon S3. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries you run. We are happy to announce that we have transparently updated Athena's underlying engine to a version based on Presto 0.172.  

With the upgrade, you can now use Functions and Operators supported by Presto version 0.172, including Lambda expressions. Lambda expressions make it simple and quick to define arbitrary inline transformations on elements of complex data types, without having to write complex SQL code to achieve the same thing. Also included, is an ability to ignore headers by using “skip.header.line.count” in table properties for CSV files.

For more information, please see the release notes.