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How is this different than Athena?

• the_af 5y ago
  Athena is not a relational database under the hood. Very different technologies with different implications.
• glogla 5y ago
  Two competing departments inside AWS. Technically, Athena is based on modified Presto while Redshift is (very) heavily modified Postgres.
  • the_af 5y ago
    Competing departments and competing underlying technologies. Postgres (and therefore Redshift) is running a relational database engine under the hood.
    • glogla 5y ago
      Yes, though with ra3 storage being on S3, I think they are getting more and more similar.
• tyingq 5y ago
  Query things other than data in S3 seems to be the big difference.
  • bdcravens 5y ago
    Athena can query non-s3 data sources using federated query.
    • the_af 5y ago
      But that's not to say it's the best idea. Athena is mostly for S3; AWS say so. From their FAQ [1]: Q: What is the difference between Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift? [...] Amazon Redshift provides the fastest query performance for enterprise reporting and business intelligence workloads, particularly those involving extremely complex SQL with multiple joins and sub-queries. [...] Amazon Athena provides the easiest way to run ad-hoc queries for data in S3 without the need to setup or manage any servers. Elsewhere they also recommend Athena for unstructured data. This and a relational database like Postgres are fundamentally different and you shouldn't use one when your use case is primarily meant for the other.
      • MaxGanzII 5y ago
        In my view, AWS docs (and support and so on) obfuscate everything which is not a strength; they cannot be trusted, not ever. Redshift is a sorted relational database and as such it provides the performance necessary to handle Big Data when and only operated correctly, which is to say, when the sorting orders of the tables are correct for the queries being issued on those tables. If you start talking as the quotes here do about "extremely complex SQL" it is going to be utterly impractical to operate Redshift correctly; it's impossibly complicated. When operated incorrectly, Redshift has the same performance profile as good old Postgres, except you have the cluster rather than a single node. The cluster is an expensive way to get 10x or 100x performance, but if you have Big Data, you need a LOT more performance than this - you need sorting, with the staggering efficiency gains it brings - but sorting only works when operated correctly. The docs from AWS here are, in my view, utterly misleading and are dangerous to readers.
        • the_af 5y ago
          Oh, agreed. We use Redshift in production and you are absolutely right about its pitfalls and downsides. Still, Athena is for S3 and is not a relational database engine, with all that this means. Redshift is one. That was my point.
• tmitchel2 5y ago
  My impression is Athena = Lambda + S3 (what i would call true serverless) Redshift Serverless = Auto AWS Managed EC2 instances with local storage + S3 Although I could be wrong as I just had a quick 5 minute look at it...