The tour of Amazon AWS services moves to Athena this week. This service is a utility on top of S3 that allows you do queries of data files stored there. Thus, it is a great tool for digging into your log, spreadsheet, or other data without the need of a DBA.
An Athena Overview
This tool is as easy to use as it is powerful. All one has to do is upload a file to S3, link to it in Athena, and map some columns. Once these steps are done then, queries can be run against the data much like any database provides. The service also provides some built-in parsers to categorize the file data. Thus, CSV, Apache log files, and other standard formats can be selected and quickly parsed into a table that can be queried.
Data Mining Made Easy
In the past, this is the kind of data that would require a consultant to review and import into a useful system. Or worse, a whole new system would need to be built to manipulate this type of data. Now the service provides a fast turn around time (minutes, once the data is uploaded). There is also a way to related data across tables and essentially build an Ad Hoc database to query and research. Almost any data store or application allows for data to be exported in CSV format. Thus, this tool makes practically all data searchable.
Not Free, Though
Athena is not a part of the free tier. There is a cost per query based on the size of the related data. However, the pricing is not the most straightforward to understand, so I recommend a review of those details before diving in. There are also S3 storage charges as normal, but those may or may not be additional in your case. It depends on whether that data was already on S3.
