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Amazon Athena vs Amazon RDS for Aurora: What are the differences?

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL while Amazon RDS for Aurora is a fully managed relational database service compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Let's explore the key differences between them:

  1. Architecture: Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that allows you to run SQL queries on data stored in Amazon S3. It leverages Presto, an open-source distributed SQL engine, to execute queries on data files directly from S3 without requiring any infrastructure provisioning. On the other hand, Amazon RDS for Aurora is a managed relational database service that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. It provides a traditional database management system with features such as data storage, transaction management, and advanced querying capabilities.

  2. Querying: Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that enables ad-hoc querying and analysis of data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL queries. On the other hand, Amazon RDS for Aurora is a fully managed relational database service that provides a traditional SQL interface for querying and managing structured data.

  3. Data Storage: Amazon Athena does not require you to load data into a separate database. It directly queries data stored in Amazon S3, which allows for flexible and cost-effective storage of large datasets. Amazon RDS for Aurora, however, requires you to load and manage your data within the Aurora database engine, which provides optimized storage and indexing capabilities.

  4. Scalability and Management: Amazon Athena automatically scales resources to handle query workloads and does not require any infrastructure management. It is a serverless service where you pay for the queries you run. Amazon RDS for Aurora, on the other hand, provides a scalable and managed relational database environment that takes care of infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and backups, but requires more management overhead compared to Athena.

In summary, Amazon Athena is a serverless query service for analyzing large datasets stored in Amazon S3, offering automatic scaling and flexible schema-less querying. Amazon RDS for Aurora is a managed relational database service optimized for high-performance transactional workloads, providing strong consistency and durability with customizable scaling options.

Advice on Amazon Athena and Amazon Aurora

Hi all,

Currently, we need to ingest the data from Amazon S3 to DB either Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift. But the problem with the data is, it is in .PSV (pipe separated values) format and the size is also above 200 GB. The query performance of the timeout in Athena/Redshift is not up to the mark, too slow while compared to Google BigQuery. How would I optimize the performance and query result time? Can anyone please help me out?

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Replies (4)

you can use aws glue service to convert you pipe format data to parquet format , and thus you can achieve data compression . Now you should choose Redshift to copy your data as it is very huge. To manage your data, you should partition your data in S3 bucket and also divide your data across the redshift cluster

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Carlos Acedo
Data Technologies Manager at SDG Group Iberia · | 5 upvotes · 248.2K views
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Amazon RedshiftAmazon Redshift

First of all you should make your choice upon Redshift or Athena based on your use case since they are two very diferent services - Redshift is an enterprise-grade MPP Data Warehouse while Athena is a SQL layer on top of S3 with limited performance. If performance is a key factor, users are going to execute unpredictable queries and direct and managing costs are not a problem I'd definitely go for Redshift. If performance is not so critical and queries will be predictable somewhat I'd go for Athena.

Once you select the technology you'll need to optimize your data in order to get the queries executed as fast as possible. In both cases you may need to adapt the data model to fit your queries better. In the case you go for Athena you'd also proabably need to change your file format to Parquet or Avro and review your partition strategy depending on your most frequent type of query. If you choose Redshift you'll need to ingest the data from your files into it and maybe carry out some tuning tasks for performance gain.

I'll recommend Redshift for now since it can address a wider range of use cases, but we could give you better advice if you described your use case in depth.

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Alexis Blandin
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Amazon AthenaAmazon Athena

It depend of the nature of your data (structured or not?) and of course your queries (ad-hoc or predictible?). For example you can look at partitioning and columnar format to maximize MPP capabilities for both Athena and Redshift

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Recommends

you can change your PSV fomat data to parquet file format with AWS GLUE and then your query performance will be improved

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Pros of Amazon Athena
Pros of Amazon Aurora
  • 16
    Use SQL to analyze CSV files
  • 8
    Glue crawlers gives easy Data catalogue
  • 7
    Cheap
  • 6
    Query all my data without running servers 24x7
  • 4
    No data base servers yay
  • 3
    Easy integration with QuickSight
  • 2
    Query and analyse CSV,parquet,json files in sql
  • 2
    Also glue and athena use same data catalog
  • 1
    No configuration required
  • 0
    Ad hoc checks on data made easy
  • 14
    MySQL compatibility
  • 12
    Better performance
  • 10
    Easy read scalability
  • 9
    Speed
  • 7
    Low latency read replica
  • 2
    High IOPS cost
  • 1
    Good cost performance

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Cons of Amazon Athena
Cons of Amazon Aurora
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 2
      Vendor locking
    • 1
      Rigid schema

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Amazon Athena?

    Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

    What is Amazon Aurora?

    Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL at a price point one tenth that of a commercial database while delivering similar performance and availability.

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    What companies use Amazon Athena?
    What companies use Amazon Aurora?
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    What tools integrate with Amazon Athena?
    What tools integrate with Amazon Aurora?

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    What are some alternatives to Amazon Athena and Amazon Aurora?
    Presto
    Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data
    Amazon Redshift Spectrum
    With Redshift Spectrum, you can extend the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond data stored on local disks in your data warehouse to query vast amounts of unstructured data in your Amazon S3 “data lake” -- without having to load or transform any data.
    Amazon Redshift
    It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
    Cassandra
    Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.
    Spectrum
    The community platform for the future.
    See all alternatives