Amazon Athena: Query S3 Using SQL(aws.amazon.com)
aws.amazon.com
Amazon Athena: Query S3 Using SQL
https://aws.amazon.com/athena/
44 comments
It looks really interesting but I'm surprised they launched it with the create table flow broken. The query you see here was generated by their wizard...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4cw5x7yyrdl3ch/Screenshot%202016-...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4cw5x7yyrdl3ch/Screenshot%202016-...
Looks very similar to Google Big Query.
Even the pricing is same: $5 / TB of data scanned.
Even the pricing is same: $5 / TB of data scanned.
When I tried it it was slower than bigquery. Plus you've got to mess about creating hive schemas.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. For all those data formats you have to painstakingly make table schemas for them before you can query them. Not like Snowflake or BigQuery. One of the biggest strikes against Presto IMHO.
Apache Drill might have been a better basis if they wanted to build a "query everything easily" based on an existing project.
It's not Presto per se, but running any data processing workload against unoptimized data formats is the issue.
Then again, both BigQuey and Snowflake require that you move data into their storage engine (Redshift too), and that's an additional step that's proportional to the size and complexity of your data. At the same time, it's stupid to store your logs as OLAP optimized formats and completely lose legibility. In sum, Athena trades off performance for convenience.
No matter what database vendors say, you can't defy the principles of computer science.
Then again, both BigQuey and Snowflake require that you move data into their storage engine (Redshift too), and that's an additional step that's proportional to the size and complexity of your data. At the same time, it's stupid to store your logs as OLAP optimized formats and completely lose legibility. In sum, Athena trades off performance for convenience.
No matter what database vendors say, you can't defy the principles of computer science.
Note that BigQuery has been able to read files straight from GCS, Drive, and even Google Spreadsheets for a while:
https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/federated-data-sources
(I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google https://twitter.com/felipehoffa)
https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/federated-data-sources
(I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google https://twitter.com/felipehoffa)
You don't replace them with an OLAP format, you can pair them with an OLAP engine to aggregate, filter, or analyze. Elastic Search and Splunk are one approach, SQL query engines are another.
Apache Drill is a schema discovery on read approach that can handle some of this. Its not perfect, but it does simplify some of the process where its capabilities fit the task at hand.
Apache Drill is a schema discovery on read approach that can handle some of this. Its not perfect, but it does simplify some of the process where its capabilities fit the task at hand.
TFA states: "Amazon Athena uses Presto with ANSI SQL support and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet."
"Amazon Athena uses Apache Hive DDL to define tables."
> Q: What data formats does Amazon Athena support?
> Amazon Athena supports a wide variety of data formats like CSV, TSV, JSON, or Textfiles and also supports open source columnar formats such as Apache ORC and Apache Parquet. Athena also supports compressed data in Snappy, Zlib, and GZIP formats. By compressing, partitioning, and using columnar formats you can improve performance and reduce your costs.
https://aws.amazon.com/athena/faqs/
> Amazon Athena supports a wide variety of data formats like CSV, TSV, JSON, or Textfiles and also supports open source columnar formats such as Apache ORC and Apache Parquet. Athena also supports compressed data in Snappy, Zlib, and GZIP formats. By compressing, partitioning, and using columnar formats you can improve performance and reduce your costs.
https://aws.amazon.com/athena/faqs/
I hope that Amazon contributes back to the Presto community.
Would be useful if AVRO files were supported. This was the data can also be imported into Redshift if needed (Redshift does support Avro).
Other formats are schema-less (JSON,CSV, etc.) or not supported by Redshift (ORC, Parquet). Perhaps less efficient for some queries (AVRO is not a columnar format) but still useful.
Other formats are schema-less (JSON,CSV, etc.) or not supported by Redshift (ORC, Parquet). Perhaps less efficient for some queries (AVRO is not a columnar format) but still useful.
Is it possible to connect Athena to existing Hive Metastore?
Anybody have an example of storing NGINX access logs and using Athena to search them?
Any examples of queries and what this can do? S3 was file storage as far as i thought?
Athena (Presto) supports standard ANSI SQL - you can query data that's stored in S3.
How does that work though, so say my bucket has 10,000 json files in it and I want all of them with the name attributes being like '%john'. Is that possible?
$5 a terabyte jeebus...don't f that query up
Just like with BigQuery, a carefully thought out partitioning scheme is critical, or your queries need to be carefully locked down to prevent excessive table scanning. I burned through my BigQuery trial credit fast, by not using partitions during a quick-and-dirty test.
Wondering if I could use this like SQLite for Lambdas. I'd like to build some serverless apps, but the commitment to a monthly fee from DynamoDB puts me off. Could I use Athena to drive down my cost to zero as long as the app is unused?
Note the 10MB minimum "charge" per Query. For small datasets under 10MB, you'd only get up to 200 Queries for the minimum billable $0.01. That would be a fairly small number of queries, so probably not that useful. Plus you'd have all kinds of issues regarding consistency if your data was dynamic (s3 is a blob store, not a database, normal s3 consistency guarantees still apply).
I'm confused though. The monthly fees for dynamodb only apply after you exceed the free tier, and for someone who is unable to commit to a monthly fee because they envision low usage, shouldn't the free tier be sufficient? (Honest question, I'm looking at using dynamodb, but comments like this make me think I'm missing something)
I'm confused though. The monthly fees for dynamodb only apply after you exceed the free tier, and for someone who is unable to commit to a monthly fee because they envision low usage, shouldn't the free tier be sufficient? (Honest question, I'm looking at using dynamodb, but comments like this make me think I'm missing something)
Only thing you're missing is that I didn't realize DynamoDB's free tier was a non-expiring free tier.
DynamoDB is like $5 or $10 bucks a month? but I understand the need to keep it to a minimum.
Athena is really interesting and if it can be as it is advertised "Serverless SQL" then they've got a killer product in the pipes: A future where developers no longer need to spend time on scaling, configuring, maintaining, strategizing deployments but upload code and instantly begin reaping the benefits of serverless tech.
The only missing component that would be a killer feature is something that answers to Azure's Active Directory. It would be nice if we had serverless plug-and-play user authentication and access control that integrated with Lambda and Athena.
I'd imagine some sort of "RoR on Serverless" type of framework that will scaffold out CRUD, User Management & REST Api is going to be in the works as well.
The only potential downside I see at the moment for Serverless is the uncertainty surrounding cold boots, it will directly affect user experience. It's fine when you got enough traffic to keep things in the "warm" state but there needs to be no dead zone when the call to the API Gateway is taking many seconds waiting for Lambda function to fire.
Athena is really interesting and if it can be as it is advertised "Serverless SQL" then they've got a killer product in the pipes: A future where developers no longer need to spend time on scaling, configuring, maintaining, strategizing deployments but upload code and instantly begin reaping the benefits of serverless tech.
The only missing component that would be a killer feature is something that answers to Azure's Active Directory. It would be nice if we had serverless plug-and-play user authentication and access control that integrated with Lambda and Athena.
I'd imagine some sort of "RoR on Serverless" type of framework that will scaffold out CRUD, User Management & REST Api is going to be in the works as well.
The only potential downside I see at the moment for Serverless is the uncertainty surrounding cold boots, it will directly affect user experience. It's fine when you got enough traffic to keep things in the "warm" state but there needs to be no dead zone when the call to the API Gateway is taking many seconds waiting for Lambda function to fire.
Just because you can query it with SQL doesn't make it a relational database suitable for use for OLTP. Athena is built on Presto, so see https://prestodb.io/docs/current/overview/use-cases.html for an explanation.
Re: users auth. Isn't that what Cognito is supposed to be? I mean, I don't fully understand it, but I think so.
As for the cold boot issue, I thought the standing solution was to have a "fast-exit" ping-like code-path within the lambda. Query it on a regular basis (you can even do it with a lambda scheduled-event). That way your lambda should be kept warm.
As for the cold boot issue, I thought the standing solution was to have a "fast-exit" ping-like code-path within the lambda. Query it on a regular basis (you can even do it with a lambda scheduled-event). That way your lambda should be kept warm.
TIL Cognito!
That completely flew under my radar, not sure why I didn't see it before (oh that's right I was heads down in Azure).
With Athena the circle is complete for me.
That fast exit ping thing is pretty cool, any more information regarding that?
Your comment is probably the most valuable one I came across to date since signing up, I wish there was a way to award a gold star like on reddit :D
There's very little objection at this point in moving to a Serverless architecture = Athena (SQL) + Lambda (CPU) + Cognito (User).
That completely flew under my radar, not sure why I didn't see it before (oh that's right I was heads down in Azure).
With Athena the circle is complete for me.
That fast exit ping thing is pretty cool, any more information regarding that?
Your comment is probably the most valuable one I came across to date since signing up, I wish there was a way to award a gold star like on reddit :D
There's very little objection at this point in moving to a Serverless architecture = Athena (SQL) + Lambda (CPU) + Cognito (User).
What's your usecase for Athena (Really curious how this changes anything)?
You can hook your lambda up to a cloudwatch scheduled event (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/events/Sc...). If you don't do much when this happens (like, you exit immediately), then you won't be charged much compute time. Can't find the reference to how often you should ping it to keep it warm, probably varies, IIRC hourly would be plenty.
You can hook your lambda up to a cloudwatch scheduled event (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/events/Sc...). If you don't do much when this happens (like, you exit immediately), then you won't be charged much compute time. Can't find the reference to how often you should ping it to keep it warm, probably varies, IIRC hourly would be plenty.
building user management, security has always been a "build your own wheel". While I think a properly secured SQL table with encrypted keywords is certainly possible the risk remains. We see even for prolific and large websites their entire user tables are dumped online on a regular basis.
Off-loading this burden on a cloud vendor whose sales are directly tied to the security, gives me peace of mind. Ashley Madison had no financial incentive to keep their user base as secure as possible or actively defend against it using R&D. Yahoo Mail as well. But AWS and Active Directory are products that sell this security and for them to fuck up on an epic scale would mean their end.
so the tldr is piggybacking on the tremendous resources from a cloud giant which frees up resources to focus on the core product.
This is not to say that it's impossible to roll out your own wheel, I'm just saying it makes more sense to align the financial incentives of vendors maintaining the user base security. This may or may not mean I'm open to focusing on companies solely focused on user auth/management products, it's tough to beat the branding and trust built into AWS & Azure that developers are voting everyday with their money & data.
Off-loading this burden on a cloud vendor whose sales are directly tied to the security, gives me peace of mind. Ashley Madison had no financial incentive to keep their user base as secure as possible or actively defend against it using R&D. Yahoo Mail as well. But AWS and Active Directory are products that sell this security and for them to fuck up on an epic scale would mean their end.
so the tldr is piggybacking on the tremendous resources from a cloud giant which frees up resources to focus on the core product.
This is not to say that it's impossible to roll out your own wheel, I'm just saying it makes more sense to align the financial incentives of vendors maintaining the user base security. This may or may not mean I'm open to focusing on companies solely focused on user auth/management products, it's tough to beat the branding and trust built into AWS & Azure that developers are voting everyday with their money & data.
My solution currently is : Aws API gateway + Cognito + lambda + DynamoDB for webservice. S3 for html/css/js. CodeDeploy + Cloudformation for deployment.
Athena does not gurantee for timing, use it for async call and offline processing
Athena does not gurantee for timing, use it for async call and offline processing
super cool! would love to find out more about your workflow using those AWS components.
what did you mean by your last sentence?
what did you mean by your last sentence?
Not OP, but athena returns results for most queries in a couple of seconds (quote is somewhere in the blogpost) this would likely not be enough for your typical request/response flows.
I wonder why they haven't chose Apache Drill over Presto. Anyone knows?
what does "point your data in S3" mean?
Are you talking about this? you left out a word.
Simply point to your data in Amazon S3
Simply point to your data in Amazon S3
Still makes no sense. Please explain if you understand.
To me the obvious use case is querying your log files as stored on s3. Query for a specific combination of features, or do some (simple) processing on them.
It's really only useful for a small list of file formats. Doesn't really do much for you if you primarily use s3 for binary data or static web hosting.
It's really only useful for a small list of file formats. Doesn't really do much for you if you primarily use s3 for binary data or static web hosting.
John Forstrom: Amazon Athena - welcome to 2010! https://twitter.com/jforstrom/status/804007642246938624
If anyone from AWS is here: how is this used internally at Amazon?