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Explain the use of Amazon Athena for serverless querying.

SQLhard0.3 min readPremium
Frequency
Low
Asked at 1 company
Category
487
questions in SQL
Difficulty Split
130E|271M|86H
in this category
Total Bank
1,863
across 7 categories
Asked at these companies
Capco
Key Concepts Tested
optimizationpartition
Expert AnswerPremium
67 wordsInterview-ready
Athena is serverless Presto over S3; pay per TB scanned. **Why serverless**: No cluster to manage; auto-scaling; instant start. **Architecture**: Glue Catalog provides schema; queries scan S3 directly. **Scalability**: Concurrency limited by account quotas; partition pruning limits scan. **Cost**: $5/TB scanned—unpartitioned full scans are expensive. **Optimization**: Partition by date/region; use Parquet/ORC (columnar, 10× less scan); compress; avoid SELECT *....
The complete answer continues with detailed implementation patterns, architectural trade-offs, and production-grade considerations. It covers performance optimization strategies, common pitfalls to avoid, and real-world examples from companies like Capco. The answer also includes follow-up discussion points that interviewers commonly explore.

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