What is a data source?

If Athena has access to data and the associated metadata, it can read that data. This is one of Athena's greatest strengths, as it can join data from anywhere to enrich and derive business value. For example, suppose an online store has its sales data in a MySQL database, has customer website traffic data in S3, and has product pricing information in DynamoDB. In that case, these datasets can be joined together to determine which pricing changes caused the most traffic to the website's stores and drove the most sales. You can look at the available data sources or add new data sources from Athena's console, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.5 – The Data sources tab in the Athena console

For this section, we will mostly focus on querying data on S3. To query data in S3, using the AWS Glue Data Catalog or the Apache Hive metastore are the fastest and easiest ways to store your databases and tables. We will...