First Athena Query

Analyze millions of records in seconds with Amazon Web Services and SQL

What you will learn

We’ve all been there. Excel locks up. Your dataframe can’t hang. And that damn query has been running for two days now.

There’s no way around it. The database you’re working on is just too big for your laptop to handle.

This tutorial offers a solution: Amazon Athena. Follow along to learn how the cloud service can rip through records with the power of Structured Query Language.

Who can take it

This course is free. Previous experience working with Amazon Web Services and SQL will come in handy, but anyone with a good attitude is qualified to take the class. You will be charged for the Amazon resources you use, so a credit card is required.

Table of contents

• 1. What is Athena?
• 2. Setting up an AWS account
• 3. Uploading data to S3
• 4. Creating an Athena database
• 5. Running SQL with Athena
• 6. Automating Athena with Python

About this class

This guide was prepared by Ben Welsh and Katlyn Alo for a training session at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting’s 2025 conference in Minneapolis. Some of the copy was written with the assistance of GitHub’s Copilot, an AI-powered text generator. The materials are available as free and open source on GitHub.