Amazon introduced a new SQL query service called Amazon Athena at the re:invent conference in Las Vegas this morning. Athena enables SQL queries directly on data stored in the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) storage service.
Athena is a serverless solution that does not require any infrastructure configuration. Users can create standard ANSI SQL queries in a new interactive query editor using standard SQL syntax like JOINs and window function to query objects stored in S3.
According to AWS CEO Andy Jassy, Athena is a complementary query tool to Redshift and Elastic Map Reduce, the company’s other data query offerings.
Query results can be visualized with AWS’s QuickSight business intelligence service or different ones via the Athena JDBC driver.
Details of the new Athena service are outlined in a new blog post from Jeff Barr at AWS.