Amazon Athena is a serverless analytics service querying data on S3 with standard SQL. No infrastructure to provision; billed on scanned data volume. Today we cover partition and format optimization, CTAS, federated queries, and cost savings.
Athena runs on Presto/Trino engine (Athena Engine v3) and uses Glue Data Catalog as metastore. Tables are just metadata pointing to S3 locations; data is not separately loaded (schema-on-read).
-- External table definition pointing to S3 path
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE orders (
order_id BIGINT,
amount DOUBLE,
status STRING
)
PARTITIONED BY (dt STRING)
STORED AS PARQUET
LOCATION 's3://datalake-clean/orders/';