Improving Query Performance for AWS Athena: Cost-Effective Strategies

Optimizing Query Performance for AWS Athena

Question

A company currently has large data sets defined in S3 and are using AWS Athena to query the data sets.

Since the query time is taking longer than expected , steps need to be taken to improve query performance.

Which of the following can be taken ensuring that cost is not increased in the implementation process? Choose 2 answers from the options given below.

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Answer - A and B.

An example of this is given in the AWS Documentation.

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Using CTAS statements with Amazon Athena to reduce cost and improve performance.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it more efficient to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.

Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Athena recently released support for creating tables using the results of a SELECT query or CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS) statement.

Analysts can use CTAS statements to create new tables from existing tables on a subset of data, or a subset of columns.

They also have options to convert the data into columnar formats, such as Apache Parquet and Apache ORC, and partition it.

Athena automatically adds the resultant table and partitions to the AWS Glue Data Catalog, making them immediately available for subsequent queries.

CTAS statements help reduce cost and improve performance by allowing users to run queries on smaller tables constructed from larger tables.

This post covers three use cases that demonstrate the benefit of using CTAS to create a new dataset, smaller than the original one, allowing subsequent queries to run faster.

Assuming our use case requires repeatedly querying the data, we can now query a smaller and more optimal dataset to get the results faster.

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Option C is incorrect since this is more of a visualization tool.

Option D is incorrect since this would increase the costs of the overall solution.

For more information on this use case, please refer to the below URL.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/using-ctas-statements-with-amazon-athena-to-reduce-cost-and-improve-performance/

The two options that can help improve query performance while ensuring that cost is not increased are:

A. Consider splitting the data set B. Consider using the CREATE TABLE AS SELECT statement

Option A: Splitting the dataset can help improve query performance, as smaller data sets can be processed faster than large ones. This can be achieved by partitioning the data based on certain criteria such as date or location, so that queries only need to scan a subset of the data. This approach can be cost-effective as it does not require any additional infrastructure or tools.

Option B: Using the CREATE TABLE AS SELECT statement allows you to create a new table based on the result of a query. This can help improve query performance as the new table can be optimized for the specific use case, and queries can be run against this new table instead of the original large data set. This approach can be cost-effective as it does not require any additional infrastructure or tools.

Option C: AWS Quicksight is a business intelligence tool that can be used to visualize and analyze data, but it is not a solution for improving query performance as it does not affect the underlying data set or query engine.

Option D: Using EMR clusters can also help improve query performance by distributing the workload across multiple nodes, but this approach can be more expensive as it requires additional infrastructure and tools to be set up and managed.

In summary, options A and B can help improve query performance while keeping costs low, while options C and D are not cost-effective solutions for this particular problem.