Posted On: Apr 5, 2022

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Athena ACID transactions, a new capability that adds insert, update, delete, and time travel operations to Athena's SQL data manipulation language (DML). Athena ACID transactions enable multiple concurrent users to make reliable, row-level modifications to their Amazon S3 data from Athena's console, API, and ODBC and JDBC drivers. Built on the Apache Iceberg table format, Athena ACID transactions are optimized for Amazon S3 storage, support seamless schema evolution, and ensure atomic operations across other services and engines that support the Iceberg table format such as Amazon EMR, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink.

Athena ACID transactions can help you make business- and regulatory-driven updates to your data using familiar SQL syntax and without requiring a custom record locking solution. Responding to a data erasure request is as simple as issuing a SQL DELETE operation. Making manual record corrections can be accomplished via a single UPDATE statement. And with time travel capability, you can recover data that was recently deleted using just a SELECT statement.

To learn more about Athena ACID transactions and Apache Iceberg integration, see Using Amazon Athena Transactions and Using Iceberg Tables in the Athena User Guide.