Overview
Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that lets you analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Key benefits include:
- No infrastructure to manage: Athena automatically scales to match query demand
- Pay-per-query: You only pay for the data scanned by each request
- Federated access: Query data across S3, Glue Data Catalog, and supported connectors
- Integrated with AWS services: Natively works with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Glue, Lake Formation, and CloudTrail
- Fast schema-on-read analytics: Start querying data almost immediately after it lands in S3
Athena is ideal for ad-hoc analysis, data exploration, and building lightweight analytics on top of data lakes without provisioning dedicated clusters.
Connecting
To connect Athena in DBCode:
- Open the DBCode extension in Visual Studio Code and select
Add Connection. - Choose Amazon Athena from the database type list.
- Configure credentials using either an AWS access key pair or default credentials chain. Make sure the IAM principal has permissions for Athena and the target S3 buckets.
- Choose the AWS region and output S3 location if you need to override the values defined by your Athena workgroup defaults (optional).
- Save the connection to load the schema tree and start running queries against your S3 datasets.
DBCode Features for Athena
With an Athena connection, DBCode provides:
- Schema Browser: Explore Glue Data Catalog databases, tables, and partitions
- SQL Editor: Write, run, and save SQL queries with Athena-specific syntax highlighting
- Results Grid: Inspect query results with JSON export and quick copy support
- Query History: Track previous statements, rerun them, and compare execution times
- Saved Connections: Share environment variables and connection templates with your team
Because Athena is read-only, data editing features are disabled. To modify source data, update the files in Amazon S3 and refresh the catalog.
Learn more about Athena at aws.amazon.com/athena.