Athena vs. Presto: Which one is right for you?
If you are looking for a powerful querying tool to analyze your data stored in S3, Athena and Presto are two popular choices. Both tools have their strengths and weaknesses, but which one is right for you? Let's find out!
What is Athena?
Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that enables you to analyze your data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is based on Apache Hive and uses Presto as the query engine. Athena is easy to manage, as it requires no infrastructure setup and automatically scales to meet the demand and size of your query.
What is Presto?
Presto is an open-source, distributed SQL query engine that allows users to query data from multiple sources, including Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Amazon S3. Presto provides fast, parallel and scalable processing for large and complex data sets.
Comparing Athena and Presto
Performance
When it comes to performance, Presto is faster than Athena, especially when querying large datasets. This is because Presto uses a distributed architecture and can perform parallel processing on data, enabling it to execute queries quickly. In contrast, Athena is a serverless service, which means the query is executed by a single instance, resulting in slightly slower query speeds.
Ease of Use
Athena is more user-friendly than Presto. With Athena, you only need to point to your data stored in S3, and it automatically infers the schema using the AWS Glue Data Catalog. On the other hand, Presto requires you first to define your schema before running the queries.
Cost
Both Athena and Presto have pay-per-query pricing models. Athena charges $5 per TB of data scanned during queries, while Presto charges $0.013 per query. If you have a small dataset, Athena may be cheaper, but if you have a large dataset, Presto may be more cost-effective.
Conclusion
Both Athena and Presto have their strengths and weaknesses. Athena is more user-friendly and is easier to use, but slower when it comes to querying large datasets. Presto is faster and can query multiple data sources, but requires users to define their schema before running queries. The decision between Athena and Presto depends on your needs and priorities.
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