Amazon Athena is an interactive query service tool that allows analyzing data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. As Athena is serverless, there is no infrastructure to manage. It can be accessed through the AWS Management Console, a Java Database Connectivity driver, an ODBC driver, or an API.

Athena is used to processing logs, perform ad-hoc analysis, and run interactive queries. It scales automatically and executes queries parallelly. Even with the large datasets and complex queries, Athena processes the queries fastly.

Why you should use Athena?

For companies that depend on S3 and require a quick but reliable query service, Athena is an ideal solution for them. Here are some benefits, that can help to understand why you should use Azure Athena.

1. Serverless. Zero infrastructure. Zero administration.
Amazon Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage. It takes care of all about configuration, software updates, failures, or scaling the infrastructure.

2. Easy to query & Integration with leading BI tools
In Amazon Athena, we can run queries against large datasets in Amazon S3 using ANSI SQL, with full support for large joins, window functions, and arrays. Using a JDBC driver, we can connect to Athena from a wide variety of BI tools.

3. Cost per query
Using Amazon Athena, the subscriber will be charged based on the amount of data scanned by each query. Its operation reduces the amount of data that Athena needs to scan to execute a query.

4. Fast performance
Athena is optimized for fast performance with Amazon S3. Athena automatically executes queries in parallel, so that you get query results in seconds, even on large datasets.

5. Data Formats
The Athena service works with many different data formats. like ORC, JSON, CSV, and Parquet. Amazon is proposing to convert data to columnar storage formats using Apache Parquet.

It also recommends partitioning data to reduce the amount of data that the query needs to scan. It will improve efficiency and reduce the costs of queries.

In short, Since Athena works with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and comes with unmatched scalability, durability, reliability and the power of object storage, this is the perfect-suite to run analytics workloads.