An introduction to Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena was originally launched as a service that simply provided a way to run SQL queries against data in an S3-based data lake. However, over the years, AWS had added a lot of additional functionality to Athena, enabling features like running queries against other databases (not just S3-based data), and supporting the use of Spark based Notebooks for querying data (in addition to SQL queries).

Structured Query Language (SQL) was invented at IBM in the 1970s but has remained an extremely popular language for querying data throughout the decades. Every day, millions of people across the world use SQL directly to explore data in a variety of databases, and many more use applications (whether business applications, mobile applications, or others) that, under the covers, use SQL to query a database.

Facebook, the social media network, has very large datasets and complex data analysis requirements and found that existing tools in the Hadoop...