Overview of Amazon Athena Pricing, Cost details with best practices

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. For more information about Amazon Athena, refer to our post http://www.cloudinfonow.com/amazon-athena/

Amazon Athena Pricing , Cost

With Amazon Athena, you only pay for the queries that you run. You are charged based on the amount of data scanned by each query. Amazon Athena has simple pricing model. Following are the features

1. Data scanned – $5 / TB . You are charged for the number of bytes scanned by Amazon Athena, rounded up to the nearest megabyte, with a 10MB minimum per query. 
2. DDL operations, SQL operations, Query concurrency – No cost to customer
3. For Federated Query, You are charged for the number of bytes scanned by Amazon Athena aggregated across all data sources.
4. Standard S3 rates for query results, storage, requests, and data transfers apply

Amazon Athena Pricing Best Practices

Some of the best practices to control the cost

1. Compress your data to scan less data. Athena supports Apache ORC and Apache Parquet Columnar formats.

1. Implement Partitioning of your data to restrict the amount of data scanned. Particularly helpful for monthly and quarterly data analytics
2. When Integrated with Quicksight, use SPICE to reduce number of Athena queries.

1. Assess query cost and timing for cost optimization

Amazon Athena Pricing/Cost Calculator

Following is sample Amazon Athena Calculator. In this example, we will how to calculate athena query cost

One of your BI analyst is running a query on a table with 1 TB of Size and in Uncompressed CSV format.

This query would cost: $5. (Price for 1 TB scanned is 1 * $5/TB = $5)

If you compress your file and also convert it to a columnar format like Apache Parquet, achieving 3:1 compression, you would still end up with 0.33 TB of data on Amazon S3. In this case the cost will be

This query would cost: $1.65. (Price for 0.33 TB scanned is 0.33 * $5/TB = $1.65)