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Amazon Athena vs Apache Flink: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between Amazon Athena and Apache Flink. Both platforms are used for data processing and analysis, but they have key differences in their capabilities and functionalities.

  1. Query Language: Amazon Athena utilizes SQL-like queries for data analysis and querying, making it easy for those familiar with SQL to use. On the other hand, Apache Flink provides a more flexible and expressive query language called Flink SQL, which supports complex event processing and supports both batch and stream processing.

  2. Processing Model: Amazon Athena is primarily designed for running ad-hoc queries on data stored in Amazon S3, making it a suitable choice for interactive analysis. Apache Flink, on the other hand, is a real-time stream processing framework that allows for continuous data processing and supports advanced operations like stateful processing and event time processing.

  3. Data Source: Amazon Athena is tightly integrated with Amazon S3 and supports querying data directly from S3 buckets. On the other hand, Apache Flink supports multiple data sources, including file systems, databases, messaging systems, and streaming platforms, providing a more versatile solution for data processing.

  4. Scalability: Amazon Athena is a managed service provided by Amazon Web Services, allowing users to scale their queries as needed by provisioning more computing resources. Apache Flink, on the other hand, can be deployed on clusters and is designed to scale horizontally, allowing for large-scale data processing and distributed computing.

  5. Connectivity: Amazon Athena provides built-in connectors to various AWS services, making it easy to integrate with other services in the AWS ecosystem. Apache Flink has a rich ecosystem of connectors and integrations with popular data storage and processing systems, providing seamless connectivity with external systems.

  6. User Interface: Amazon Athena offers a web-based query editor and console for managing and executing queries. Apache Flink provides a web-based dashboard and APIs for managing and monitoring jobs, allowing users to interact with the system programmatically.

In summary, Amazon Athena is a serverless query service optimized for ad-hoc analysis on data stored in Amazon S3, with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. Apache Flink, on the other hand, is a powerful stream processing framework that supports real-time data processing, complex event processing, and advanced analytics, with a strong focus on performance and scalability.

Advice on Amazon Athena and Apache Flink
Nilesh Akhade
Technical Architect at Self Employed · | 5 upvotes · 522.4K views

We have a Kafka topic having events of type A and type B. We need to perform an inner join on both type of events using some common field (primary-key). The joined events to be inserted in Elasticsearch.

In usual cases, type A and type B events (with same key) observed to be close upto 15 minutes. But in some cases they may be far from each other, lets say 6 hours. Sometimes event of either of the types never come.

In all cases, we should be able to find joined events instantly after they are joined and not-joined events within 15 minutes.

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
ElasticsearchElasticsearch

The first solution that came to me is to use upsert to update ElasticSearch:

  1. Use the primary-key as ES document id
  2. Upsert the records to ES as soon as you receive them. As you are using upsert, the 2nd record of the same primary-key will not overwrite the 1st one, but will be merged with it.

Cons: The load on ES will be higher, due to upsert.

To use Flink:

  1. Create a KeyedDataStream by the primary-key
  2. In the ProcessFunction, save the first record in a State. At the same time, create a Timer for 15 minutes in the future
  3. When the 2nd record comes, read the 1st record from the State, merge those two, and send out the result, and clear the State and the Timer if it has not fired
  4. When the Timer fires, read the 1st record from the State and send out as the output record.
  5. Have a 2nd Timer of 6 hours (or more) if you are not using Windowing to clean up the State

Pro: if you have already having Flink ingesting this stream. Otherwise, I would just go with the 1st solution.

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Akshaya Rawat
Senior Specialist Platform at Publicis Sapient · | 3 upvotes · 365.9K views
Recommends
on
Apache SparkApache Spark

Please refer "Structured Streaming" feature of Spark. Refer "Stream - Stream Join" at https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/structured-streaming-programming-guide.html#stream-stream-joins . In short you need to specify "Define watermark delays on both inputs" and "Define a constraint on time across the two inputs"

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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 · 235.7K views
Recommends
on
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
Recommends
on
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 Apache Flink
  • 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
  • 16
    Unified batch and stream processing
  • 8
    Easy to use streaming apis
  • 8
    Out-of-the box connector to kinesis,s3,hdfs
  • 4
    Open Source
  • 2
    Low latency

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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 Apache Flink?

Apache Flink is an open source system for fast and versatile data analytics in clusters. Flink supports batch and streaming analytics, in one system. Analytical programs can be written in concise and elegant APIs in Java and Scala.

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What are some alternatives to Amazon Athena and Apache Flink?
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.
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