This looks very neat. I'm someone who deals with a lot of plaintext data from a variety of sources, and so I find using ack/grep and csvkit to be efficient enough for my purposes of exploration. I love using SQL and SQLite but rarely do it for "fun" -- that is, I'll use it when I've committed to building a project, but not for exploration. This seems like it could lighten the friction quite a bit.<p>If anyone from AWS is here: how is this used internally at Amazon?
"Amazon Athena uses Presto with ANSI SQL support and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet."<p>I wonder if this is essentially a Presto SaaS product?
It looks really interesting but I'm surprised they launched it with the create table flow broken. The query you see here was generated by their wizard...<p><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4cw5x7yyrdl3ch/Screenshot%202016-11-30%2009.56.04.png?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4cw5x7yyrdl3ch/Screenshot%202016-...</a>
Would be useful if AVRO files were supported. This was the data can also be imported into Redshift if needed (Redshift does support Avro).<p>Other formats are schema-less (JSON,CSV, etc.) or not supported by Redshift (ORC, Parquet). Perhaps less efficient for some queries (AVRO is not a columnar format) but still useful.
Wondering if I could use this like SQLite for Lambdas. I'd like to build some serverless apps, but the commitment to a monthly fee from DynamoDB puts me off. Could I use Athena to drive down my cost to zero as long as the app is unused?