Many of you use Amazon Athena to run SQL queries across your data lake, powering everything from interactive analytics to scheduled reporting pipelines, often with limited observability into those workloads. As your Athena usage grows, with more users, workgroups, and queries, you need to know which queries are expensive, who ran them, whether performance is changing, and how to attribute costs.
Athena now offers system tables and today we introduce the first, query_executions, which automatically captures your usage data and makes it available for observability, usage analysis, and audit use cases. When you turn on system tables, usage data becomes available within minutes of query completion across your workgroups. Athena stores it as Apache Iceberg tables on Amazon S3 Tables, a capability of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with configurable retention. You can query it directly with Athena while AWS manages the tables for you, including schema…
