Using Amazon Athena for the first time

Introducing 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 setup or manage, and you can start analyzing data immediately. You don’t even need to load your data into Athena, it works directly with data stored in S3.

Using Amazon Athena for the first time

Amazon Athena automatically stores query results and metadata information for each query that runs in a query result location that you can specify in Amazon S3. If necessary, you can access the files in this location to work with them. You can also download query result files directly from the Athena console.

  1. Go to Athena console. Click Launch query editor.

    Athena console

  2. On the top menu, click Workgroup: primary.

    Workgroup: primary

  3. Choose Settings, click on Browse S3 and select s3://serverlessanalytics-[your-account-id]-athena as the value for the Location of query result - optional field.

  4. Go to the bottom of the page, click Save.

    Query result location and encryption

  5. Go to the top menu, click on Editor to return back to the Query editor page.