Amazon Athena turns any S3 bucket into a queryable database without you ever provisioning a server, and in September 2026 it’s still the tool most engineering teams reach for first when they need to run SQL against a data lake. The current engine, Athena engine version 3, has been the production standard since AWS folded in more than 50 new SQL functions and over 90 performance improvements on top of engine version 2, and there’s no confirmed engine version 4 in general availability as of this writing. Pricing hasn’t changed either: Athena still bills $5 per terabyte of data scanned for standard SQL queries, which means the difference between a well-partitioned Parquet table and a raw CSV dump can be the difference between a query costing a fraction of a cent and one costing real money at scale.
Amazon Athena Setup: 13 Steps, Query S3 at $5/TB
