Summary

In this chapter, we covered a really broad array of topics, all focused on giving you the right concepts to consider when building an application that leverages Athena (though many topics would benefit you no matter what you are building).

We discussed your different options for connecting to Athena and how to decide which one is right for you, whether it is using the AWS SDK, the JDBC driver, or the ODBC driver – deciding between the convenience of implementation, especially if you are already familiar with the JDBC/ODBC frameworks, versus the flexibility of having direct access to the SDK.

Then we continued the discussion of connecting to Athena, but with a focus on best practices. Firstly, we covered making sure you are leveraging idempotency tokens (in Athena's case, ClientRequestTokens) to make sure you are safely retrying on unclear failures, which is a feature you get for free with the SDK! And then we looked at how best to track the status of queries...