# AWS Athena

> Amazon Athena runs SQL queries directly on data stored in Amazon S3, without servers, and charges per amount of data scanned.

- Source: https://www.itwonderlab.com/aws-athena/
- Published: 2026-05-30
- Updated: 2026-05-30
- Author: Javier Ruiz Jiménez (https://www.javierruizjimenez.com/)
- Site: IT Wonder Lab (https://www.itwonderlab.com/)

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**Amazon Athena** is a serverless interactive query service based on Trino. You define tables over files in [S3](https://www.itwonderlab.com/aws-s3/) (CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC) in the Glue Data Catalog and query them with standard SQL, paying per terabyte scanned. Columnar formats such as Parquet and partitioning reduce cost a lot. It is commonly used to analyze [CloudTrail](https://www.itwonderlab.com/aws-cloudtrail/), ALB and VPC flow logs.

With Terraform: `aws_athena_workgroup`, `aws_athena_database` and `aws_glue_catalog_table`.