Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - What’s new in Amazon Athena (ANT208)

Summary

Scott Rigney, a product manager on the Athena team, introduced new features and updates for Amazon Athena.
Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in data lakes.
Athena is built on open standards like Presto and supports multiple data formats.
Athena's cost-effectiveness is highlighted, with savings up to 90% using compression, partitioning, and columnar formats.
Common use cases for Athena include interactive analytics, business intelligence, data workflows, and machine learning.
Athena Engine version 3 was announced, offering faster queries, more features from open source, and incorporation of Trino.
New features include 50 new functions, 90 enhancements to existing functions, and pre-result caching for faster query execution.
Ofer Eliasov from Mobileye presented their use case of Athena for autonomous vehicle mapping technology.
Mobileye's Road Experience Management (REM) uses crowd-sourced data to create high-definition maps for autonomous driving.
Athena's federated query feature allows querying data from various sources without data movement.
Athena's support for Apache Iceberg and AWS Lake Formation was discussed, enhancing data lake management and security.
Amazon AppFlow's integration with AWS Glue Data Catalog was announced, facilitating data ingestion from SaaS sources to S3 for querying with Athena.

Athena's serverless nature and pay-per-query model provide a cost-effective solution for data analysis, especially for organizations with variable query loads.
The introduction of Athena Engine version 3 with Trino integration signifies AWS's commitment to staying current with open-source advancements and providing customers with more powerful and efficient query capabilities.
The use case of Mobileye demonstrates Athena's capability to handle large-scale, complex data workloads and its applicability in cutting-edge fields like autonomous driving.
Pre-result caching is a significant feature that can improve query performance and reduce costs by avoiding redundant data scans for repeated queries.
Athena's federated query capability is a strategic feature that addresses the common challenge of data silos, enabling a more unified view of an organization's data landscape.
The support for Apache Iceberg and integration with AWS Lake Formation indicates a move towards more robust data governance and management within data lakes.
Amazon AppFlow's new features show AWS's efforts to streamline data integration from various SaaS platforms, enhancing the ease of bringing external data into the AWS ecosystem for analysis with Athena.