The answers that companies need from their data can be quite technical. With the expansion into cloud storage, the data has become too big to handle. Meanwhile, the tools to manage the data aren’t easy to use. Data has to be kept somewhere, and companies have to think about how to store data, access it, make it reliable. Amazon Athena helps with this issue.
Athena is a query service that companies can use to run queries regarding their data. It’s serverless, and you don’t need to use database software or any other infrastructure to handle the data. You can also smoothly run SQL queries and expect to get large chunks in just a few seconds.
Now, let’s see how to use Amazon Athena. To use this service, you need to store the data in Amazon S3, which is an object storage service. Amazon S3 makes the data quite safe and easy to use. Amazon Moreover, this query service provides the data you need from the storage. Thus, you shouldn’t be concerned about designing databases.
You can consider Amazon Athena as a Google search. The data is out there, but it’s challenging to find the data that you need. Just like a Google search, you create the boundaries for the query you want to perform. The only difference is that you use a cloud computing service instead of a search engine.
The great thing about Amazon Athena is that you don’t need to store the data, which is the case with local data. The standard procedure involves ETL (Extract, Transform, Load). However, here you can search for your query without ETL, which simplifies things. Just point the data towards S3 and begin the query.
Similar to other Amazon Web Services like Amazon Alexa, Amazon Athena gives greater flexibility in how you run the data without complications. An example of this is a pharmaceutical company using the cloud for research. Each staff member will need setup and configuration to create databases for queries. With the help of Athena, you can run many queries simultaneously, and then you will get the result within seconds. These results mean that companies can do their work smoothly and make better decisions.
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Another main advantage of Amazon Athena is that it lowers the overall cost. Companies don’t need to manage the footprints for the datasets. Thus, if companies need to do a variety of searches, they don’t need to reconfigure their data and improve the IT infrastructure. Athena expands the variables for your search.
Amazon Athena is quite flexible, and it can entertain a variety of queries simultaneously. It runs the standard SQL and supports multiple data formats, like Avro, Parquet, JSON, ORC, and CSV. Moreover, Athena uses Presto, an open-source SQL query engine. It also supports complex arrays and joins.
The power comes into play with Athena as it runs on Amazon S3. Thus, all the benefits of Amazon Athena come without having to reconfigure the basic infrastructure. Therefore, the biggest advantage of Athena is that companies can focus more on the actual results and less on the platform itself.