What is the difference between Amazon Athena and S3 Select

Question

What is the difference between Athena and S3 Select? Can someone highlight the difference between these two? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Athena can be used by AWS Console, AWS CLI but S3 Select is basically an API. Both works on S3 data but lets say you have a scenario like this you have 1GB csv file with 10 equal sized columns and you are summing the values on 1 column. With athena, athena downloads 1GB from s3 into athena, scans the file and sums the data. With S3 select, you get a 100MB file back that only contains the one column you want to sum, but you'd have to do the summing. With Athena+S3 Select, Athena requests just that column from S3, it returns 100MB to Athena, and then Athena does the summing for you.

Hope you got the answer.

Comments

Does Athena use s3 select internally without having to configure anything when using RegEx SerDe for example ?

---

Amazon Athena uses Presto with full standard SQL support and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet. Athena can handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays. Because Amazon Athena uses Amazon S3 as the underlying data store, it is highly available and durable with data redundantly stored across multiple facilities and multiple devices in each facility.

---

Hi. You said that Athena and S3 Select can be used together. How does that work?

---

```

With Athena+S3 Select, Athena requests just that column from S3, it returns 100MB to Athena, and then Athena does the summing for you.

```

You mean, "S3 Select requests just that column from S3....", right ?

---

Yes you can say that.