Let's quickly go through some important concepts related to Amazon Athena:
- Athena is a query service provided by AWS to analyze data in Amazon S3 using SQL.
- Athena can only query S3 data and not CloudTrail directly.
- Amazon Athena now supports federated queries. We can run SQL queries across data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources, and then store the result in Amazon S3. At the time of writing, this feature is in preview.
- Athena is serverless. We do not have to set up any infrastructure and we only pay for the queries we run.
- Athena, integrated with AWS Glue, allows us to crawl data sources and populate table and partition definitions, and even maintain schema versioning.