Amazon Athena

• It is serverless query service that can be used to analyze data stored in an S3 bucket
• Uses standard SQL language to query file (built on Presto)
• Supports CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro and Parquet
• Pricing: $5 per TB of data scanned
• Commonly used with Amazon Quicksight for reporting/dashboards
• Use cases: business intelligence, analytics, reporting, analyzing VPC Flow Logs, ELB Logs, CloudTrail trails, etc.

Performance Improvements

• Use columnar data for cost-savings (scan less data). Examples: Parquet or ORC formats. We can use Glue to convert data to these formats
• Compress data for smaller retrievals (bzip, gzip, lz4, snappy, zlip, zstd)
• Partition datasets in S3 for easy querying on virtual columns
• User larger files (>128 MB) to minimize overhead

Federated Queries

• Allows us to run SQL queries across data stored in relational, non-relational, object and custom data sources (AWS or on-premises)
• This can be accomplished with Data Source Connectors that run AWS Lambda to execute Federated Queries
• Results will be stored in S3 buckets