Is Amazon Athena a database?

Athena executes SQL queries against the data stored in Amazon S3. So you can add/remove/modify data as you normally would in S3, then execute the Athena queries against the data directly. There’s no need to load the data into a RDBMS from S3.

When using Athena, you’ll pay the following:

  • The storage costs in S3 of the data at normal S3 prices,
  • The storage costs in S3 of your Athena query results,
  • $5 per TB of data that Athena scans during the queries.