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AWS › Amazon Athena

What is Amazon Athena and what problem does it solve?

Beginner

Answer

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that lets you analyze data stored directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, without needing to set up or manage any database servers, making it easy to quickly explore large datasets and only pay for the queries you actually run.
SELECT * FROM sales_data WHERE region = 'US' LIMIT 10;
Real-world example A marketing team analyzes millions of website log files stored in S3 using simple SQL queries in Athena, getting insights within minutes instead of setting up a full data warehouse.

Common follow-ups: What file formats does Athena support?;How is Athena priced?