Posted On: Apr 16, 2024

Today, Amazon Athena announced federated query pass-through, a new feature that allows entire queries to be executed directly on the underlying data source. Federated query pass-through allows you to take advantage of the unique functions, query language, and performance capabilities of different data sources, and can result in faster query execution and less data processed by Athena.

With Athena, you can run federated queries on data sources such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, and Snowflake to unlock once siloed data for interactive analysis, business intelligence reporting, and other use cases without ETL jobs to first extract and prepare data for analysis. Today’s release enhances federated queries by allowing you to use the query language and functions of federated data sources in your Athena queries. For example, you can now run Athena queries on DynamoDB using the PartiQL language. Federated query pass-through is also useful when you want to run SELECT queries that aggregate, join, or invoke functions of your data source that are not available in Athena.

Federated query pass-through is generally available in all AWS Regions where Athena is available.

To get started, see Running federated passthrough queries. Refer to Updating a data source connector to upgrade connectors that you use today to the latest version.