athena vs redshift aws cost - Brave Search

upsolver.com › home › blog › aws athena pricing vs. aws redshift pricing comparison

AWS Athena Pricing vs. AWS Redshift Pricing Comparison | Upsolver

May 28, 2024 - Athena costs $5 per TB of compressed data scanned. While you incur no additional costs for DDL statements or failed queries, standard charges of other AWS resources like S3 bucket, Lambda, Glue Data Catalog, etc., apply if provisioned.

risingwave.com › blog › aws-athena-vs-redshift-which-is-more-cost-effective

AWS Athena vs Redshift: Which is More Cost-Effective? - RisingWave: Real-Time Event Streaming Platform

AWS Athena employs a straightforward pricing model. Users pay a flat fee of \$5 per terabyte of data scanned. This model suits sporadic or small-scale querying. The pay-per-query structure ensures cost efficiency for users who need to run occasional ...

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Difference between Athena and Redshift Spectrum - YouTube

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Athena Vs Redshift - a detailed comparison ⚖️ - YouTube

Redshift Spectrum vs Amazon Athena #aws #awstutorial #cloud - YouTube

February 19, 2025

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integrate.io › blog › amazon-redshift-spectrum-vs-athena

Amazon Redshift Spectrum vs. Athena: A Detailed Comparison | Integrate.io

July 21, 2025 - You only pay for the queries you run. The total cost is calculated according to the amount of data you scan per query. The cost of running queries in Redshift Spectrum and Athena is $5 per TB of scanned data.

reddit.com › r/aws › redshift vs athena

r/aws on Reddit: Redshift vs Athena

May 11, 2022 -

I'm building a web service via API Gateway that would allow users to run queries on a DB. The data is in S3 and I thought of using Athena and have Lambda run queries against it. Thing is, I see a lot of similar designs but with Redshift instead of Athena. One of our Principal Engineers said Redshift fits better for a web service compared to Athena (but I didn't ask why). Any idea why it's the case?

EDIT: for context the data in S3 is parquet and it is partitioned. I'm expecting a moderate number of users using the API.

Athena queries are asynchronous. Your API call starts the query and returns that it's been successfully requested. In order to get the data, you need to poll the query status and then read the results from S3. Athena's latency is also comparable high, since it loads your data from S3 into a temporary environment for every query. Between those two, Athena doesn't tend to be a good fit for a REST API.

Redshift isnt serverless, so you'll have to have it running 730 hours a month to ensure round-the-clock service.

firebolt.io › comparison › athena-vs-redshift

Athena vs Redshift | Performance & Pricing: Comparison Guide

Compare Athena vs Redshift to understand their features, pricing, performance, and use cases. Discover which platform suits your business needs.

chaossearch.io › blog › when-to-deploy-aws-redshift-or-athena-use-cases

AWS Redshift vs AWS Athena: Best Use Cases for Each

April 29, 2024 - An alternative to AWS Redshift and AWS Athena is Chaos LakeDB, the first and only data lake database that powers full-text search, SQL and Gen AI analytics with no data movement or ETL process. Our Redshift vs. ChaosSearch performance comparison proved that our proprietary data indexing technology offers better compression ratios than Amazon Redshift, resulting in lower data storage costs ...

edgedelta.com › company › knowledge-center › athena-vs-redshift

Athena vs Redshift: Choosing the Right AWS Analytics Tool

May 6, 2025 - Thus, it’s best to choose a service that integrates well with existing AWS tools. The type of data workload you have will determine which of Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena is best for you. Athena is the optimal choice if your primary need is cost-efficient, ad-hoc analysis on S3-stored data.

upsolver.com › home › blog › athena or redshift? 4 questions to decide

Athena or Redshift? 4 Questions to Decide | Upsolver

May 28, 2024 - Querying costs can also be ... have an impact on performance. Redshift is a relational database and best suited for tabular data; Athena is better for semi-structured and unstructured data....

stackoverflow.com › questions › 50250114 › athena-vs-redshift-spectrum

amazon web services - Athena vs Redshift Spectrum - Stack Overflow

I have used both across a few different use cases and conclude:

Advantages of Redshift Spectrum:

Allows creation of Redshift tables
Able to join Redshift tables with Redshift spectrum tables efficiently

If you do not need those things then you should consider Athena as well

Athena differences from Redshift spectrum:

Billing. This is the major difference and depending on your use case you may find one much cheaper than the other
Performance. I found Athena slightly faster.
SQL syntax and features. Athena is derived from presto and is a bit different to Redshift which has its roots in postgres.
Connectivity. Its easy enough to connect to Athena using API,JDBC or ODBC but many more products offer "standard out of the box" connection to Redshift

Also, for either solution, make sure you use the AWS Glue metadata, rather than Athena as there are fewer limitations.

This question has been up for quite a time, but still, I think I can contribute something to the discussion.

What is Athena?

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy 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. (From the Doc)

Pretty straight forward, right?

Then comes the question of what is Redshift Spectrum and why Amazon folks made it when Athena was pretty much a solution for external table queries?

So, AWS folks wanted to create an extension to Redshift (which is pretty popular as a managed columnar datastore at this time) and give it the capability to talk to external tables(typically S3). But they wanted to make life easier for Redshift users, mostly analytics people. Many analytics tools don't support Athena but support Redshift at this time. But creating your Reshift cluster and storing data was a bottleneck. Again Redshift isn't that horizontally scalable and it takes some downtime in case of adding new machines. If you are a Redshift user, making your storage cheaper makes your life so much easier basically.

I suggest you use Redshift spectrum in the following cases:

You are an existing Redshift user and you want to store more data in Redshift.
You want to move colder data to an external table but still, want to join with Redshift tables in some cases.
Spark unloading of your data and if you just want to import data to Pandas or any other tools for analyzing.

And Athena can be useful when:

You are a new user and don't have Redshift cluster. Access to Spectrum requires an active, running Redshift instance. So Redshift Spectrum is not an option without Redshift.
As Spectrum is still a developing tool and they are kind of adding some features like transactions to make it more efficient.
BTW Athena comes with a nice REST API , so go for it you want that.

All to say Redshift + Redshift Spectrum is indeed powerful with lots of promises. But it has still a long way to go to be mature.

Find elsewhere

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medium.com › codex › amazon-redshift-vs-athena-vs-glue-comparison-6ecfb8e92349

Amazon Redshift vs Athena vs Glue. Comparison | by Roman Ceresnak, PhD | CodeX | Medium

January 10, 2023 - AWS Glue offers built-in high availability and pay-as-you-go billing to improve agility and reduce costs. ... Applications for clients. Business intelligence (BI) reporting, data mining, and analytics tools are all supported by Amazon Redshift’s integration with a variety of data loading and ETL (extract, transform, and load) tools.

Chariot Solutions

chariotsolutions.com › home › performance comparison: athena versus redshift

Performance Comparison: Athena versus Redshift — Chariot Solutions

November 21, 2023 - In my experience, the answer is no, especially if you have partitioned the data. Moreover, if you wanted to store a single terabyte in a provisioned Redshift cluster, you’d need at least an 8-node dc2.large, which would cost you $48/day to run. That’s enough to scan 9 terabytes with Athena.

hevodata.com › home › blog › data warehousing

Amazon Redshift Vs Athena: Compare On 7 Key Factors

December 30, 2024 - The leader node internally communicates with the Compute node to retrieve the query results. In Redshift, both compute and storage layers are coupled, however in Redshift Spectrum, compute and storage layers are decoupled. Athena is a serverless analytics service where an Analyst can directly perform the query execution over AWS S3.

hevodata.com › home › learn › data warehousing

Athena vs Redshift Serverless: 5 Critical Differences | Hevo

January 10, 2025 - Stuck choosing between Athena vs Redshift Serverless for data queries? This guide breaks down cost, performance & use cases to pick the winner!

bytehouse.cloud › blog › compare-athena-redshift-spectrum

AWS Athena vs. Redshift Spectrum - Which One To Choose? | Blog | ByteHouse

The choice between them largely depends on the specific use case and workload. Athena is a good option if you're a beginner and just beginning your data journey. It is cost-effective and works best with ad hoc queries and small workloads. If you're already using AWS Redshift, then it makes more sense to choose Redshift Spectrum.

chartio.com › resources › tutorials › redshift-vs-athena

Redshift vs Athena | Tutorial by Chartio

June 6, 2016 - Redshift requires framework management and data preparation while Athena bypasses that and gets straight to querying data from Amazon S3. Amazon Redshift excels when it comes to large, organized, and traditionally relational datasets- it does well with performing aggregations, complex joins, and inner queries. The foundation of Redshift is great for expanding data, and it’s just as simple as adding more clusters. Cost depends on data type and total usage which can create a beneficial predictability for businesses.

risingwave.com › blog › redshift-vs-athena-choose-the-best-aws-service

Redshift vs Athena: Choose the Best AWS Service - RisingWave: Real-Time Event Streaming Platform

While Redshift offers potential savings through Reserved Instances for steady workloads, Athena's pay-per-query structure ensures efficient spending by charging solely for executed queries without additional overhead costs. Understanding your organization's data processing patterns is crucial in selecting the most cost-efficient AWS service tailored to your specific needs.

sprinkledata.com › blogs › athena-vs-redshift-unraveling-the-battle-of-cloud-data-warehouses

Amazon Athena vs. Amazon Redshift: Choosing the Right Data Warehousing Solution

March 15, 2024 - Compare Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift, two leading data warehousing solutions offered by AWS. Explore their features, performance, cost-effectiveness, scalability, ease of use, integrations, data processing paradigms, query optimization, compression, partitioning, consistency, and supported ...

medium.com › data-engineering-chariot › performance-comparison-athena-vs-redshift-5f8f9ec1436a

Performance Comparison: Athena vs. Redshift | by Chariot Solutions | Thoughts on Data Engineering | Medium

June 19, 2023 - In my experience, the answer is no, especially if you have partitioned the data. Moreover, if you wanted to store a single terabyte in a provisioned Redshift cluster, you’d need at least an 8-node dc2.large, which would cost you $48/day to run. That’s enough to scan 9 terabytes with Athena.

blazeclan.com › home › blog › redshift spectrum vs athena: what makes them different?

Redshift Spectrum vs Athena: What Makes Them Different?

January 8, 2024 - AWS rounds up to the nearest megabyte, so you’ll always pay at least $5 per query. If your 10 MB free trial expires without any charges applied to your account, Athena will charge you based on how much data was scanned.

blog.openbridge.com › how-is-aws-redshift-spectrum-different-than-aws-athena-9baa2566034b

How is AWS Redshift Spectrum different than AWS Athena? | Openbridge

April 8, 2021 - AWS Athena is based on Facebook Presto and includes some Apache Hive goodness. Assuming you have objects on S3 that Athena can consume, then you might start with Athena vs. spinning up Redshift clusters. A query in Athena and Spectrum generally has the same compute cost of $5 per terabyte scanned.