Posted On: Dec 19, 2022
You can now query Delta Lake tables seamlessly in Amazon Athena, giving you the benefit of increased operational efficiency, improved query performance and reduced cost. Delta Lake is an open-source table format that helps implement modern data lake architectures commonly built on Amazon S3. Prior to this launch, reading Delta Lake tables in Athena required a complex process of generating and managing additional metadata files. Now you can use Athena to query Delta Lake tables directly without this additional effort.
Athena enables interactive analytics and dashboard reporting for Delta Lake-formatted data lakes and now your Delta Lake table updates are available for analysis in Athena as soon as they are completed. Athena uses metadata contained in Delta Lake files to optimize your queries, so you reduce your data scan costs and get up to 40% performance improvement in your Athena queries. Athena makes it easier for you to create and manage Delta Lake tables in AWS Glue Data Catalog by using simple DDL statements such as CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE and DESCRIBE TABLE, which are consistent with other table types supported in Athena. You can also use AWS Glue Crawler to discover Delta Lake table schemas and manage schema updates in Glue Data Catalog for Delta Lake files, making newly cataloged data available for analysis in Athena seamlessly.
Enhanced read support for Delta Lake is available in Athena engine version 3, can be used with the Athena drivers, API, or console, and is available in all supported regions. To learn more about the new Delta Lake support in Athena, see Querying Delta Lake tables in the Athena user documentation.