# Amazon Athena

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-athena/

8 people recommended Amazon Athena in Hacker News comments, 5 had mixed feelings and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 12 months, in 9 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend Athena for querying data in S3 without running servers, with simple SQL and little setup. Critics say it lags other query engines on features and file formats.

Summary written by Claude from 18 comments.

## Why people recommend it

- No servers to host or manage (2 comments in the sample): "If we use this we get indefinite RAM indefinite CPU and do not need to host a server" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333130)) "You use the cloud provider service provided (BigQuery or AWS Athena for example" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668051))
- Simple SQL over S3 data (2 comments in the sample): "can dump to S3 (log archive) where you can use Athena/Trino" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45921416)) "Athena + S3 is good enough." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47868068))

## What people warn about

- Weaker than other query engines (2 comments in the sample): "possibly the worst major query engine in terms of support for query features and file formats" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50292330)) "Amazon Athena is a joke compared to it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238208))

## Other cloud data warehouses people recommend

- [Google BigQuery](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bigquery/): 19 recommend, 4 mixed, 6 criticize
- [Apache DataFusion](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-datafusion/): 16 recommend, 1 mixed, 2 criticize
- [Snowflake](https://hackerapproved.com/p/snowflake/): 15 recommend, 10 mixed, 21 criticize

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/athena/)

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Amazon Athena", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-athena/ (8 recommend, 5 mixed, 5 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.