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Cloud Computing · Foundational

Amazon Athena

Serverless interactive query service that runs SQL directly on data in Amazon S3, billed per data scanned.

Definition

Athena uses a distributed SQL engine with the AWS Glue Data Catalog for table definitions, so there is no infrastructure to manage. Cost and performance improve by storing data in columnar formats such as Parquet or ORC, compressing it and partitioning it so less data is scanned.

Example

Security analysts query CloudTrail logs in S3 with Athena to find all API calls from a suspicious IP.

Exam tip

Athena is the answer for ad hoc SQL on S3 with no servers; reduce cost with partitioning and columnar formats.

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