Getting to know Amazon Athena
In Chapter 1, Your First Query, we learned that Amazon Athena is a query service that allows you to run standard SQL over data stored in various sources and formats. We also saw that Athena's pricing model is unique in that we are charged by how much data our query reads and not by how many servers or how much time our queries require. In this section, we will go beyond that cursory introduction and discuss the broader set of capabilities that together make Athena a product worth considering for your next analytics project. We do not go into full detail on every item we are preparing to discuss, but later chapters will allow you to get hands-on with the most notable features. For now, our goal is to increase your awareness of what is possible with Athena, so you can perform technical product selection exercises (aka bakeoffs) or steer toward areas of interest.
Understanding the "serverless" trend
The word serverless appears dozens...
