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Amazon Athena vs Cassandra: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Amazon Athena and Cassandra

Amazon Athena and Cassandra are popular NoSQL database solutions that offer different functionalities and use cases. Here are the key differences between the two:

  1. Architecture and Data Model: Amazon Athena follows a serverless architecture, allowing users to execute ad-hoc SQL queries on the data stored in Amazon S3. It allows for schema-on-read and supports structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. On the other hand, Cassandra is a distributed database system that follows a decentralized architecture using a peer-to-peer (P2P) model. It offers a column-based data model and is designed to handle high write throughput.

  2. Scalability and Elasticity: Amazon Athena automatically scales based on query demands, making it highly scalable. It enables users to process large amounts of data without managing infrastructure. Cassandra also supports horizontal scalability by adding more nodes to the cluster as data grows. However, it requires manual setup and configuration to ensure optimal performance.

  3. Data Consistency: In Amazon Athena, the data consistency is eventually consistent as it reads data directly from Amazon S3. This means that changes to the data may not be instantly reflected in query results. In Cassandra, users can configure the consistency level based on their requirements, allowing for stronger consistency if needed.

  4. Query Language: Amazon Athena uses Standard SQL for querying data stored in Amazon S3. It supports common SQL functionalities, including joins, window functions, and complex aggregations. Cassandra, on the other hand, uses Cassandra Query Language (CQL), which is similar to SQL but with some specific syntax and limitations.

  5. Data Storage: Amazon Athena stores data in Amazon S3, which provides durable and scalable object storage. It is suitable for storing large volumes of data cost-effectively. Cassandra, on the other hand, uses its own distributed file system called Cassandra File System (CFS). It replicates data across multiple nodes for high availability and fault tolerance.

  6. Data Replication and Durability: Amazon Athena relies on the durability and availability of data in Amazon S3. It inherits the replication and durability features provided by Amazon S3. Cassandra, on the other hand, offers multiple replication strategies, allowing users to configure data replication across multiple data centers for high availability and durability.

In summary, Amazon Athena is a serverless query service for processing data stored in Amazon S3, offering scalability and flexibility. Cassandra, on the other hand, is a distributed database system designed for high write throughput and data replication across multiple nodes.

Advice on Amazon Athena and Cassandra

Hi all,

Currently, we need to ingest the data from Amazon S3 to DB either Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift. But the problem with the data is, it is in .PSV (pipe separated values) format and the size is also above 200 GB. The query performance of the timeout in Athena/Redshift is not up to the mark, too slow while compared to Google BigQuery. How would I optimize the performance and query result time? Can anyone please help me out?

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Replies (4)

you can use aws glue service to convert you pipe format data to parquet format , and thus you can achieve data compression . Now you should choose Redshift to copy your data as it is very huge. To manage your data, you should partition your data in S3 bucket and also divide your data across the redshift cluster

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Carlos Acedo
Data Technologies Manager at SDG Group Iberia · | 5 upvotes · 234.5K views
Recommends
on
Amazon RedshiftAmazon Redshift

First of all you should make your choice upon Redshift or Athena based on your use case since they are two very diferent services - Redshift is an enterprise-grade MPP Data Warehouse while Athena is a SQL layer on top of S3 with limited performance. If performance is a key factor, users are going to execute unpredictable queries and direct and managing costs are not a problem I'd definitely go for Redshift. If performance is not so critical and queries will be predictable somewhat I'd go for Athena.

Once you select the technology you'll need to optimize your data in order to get the queries executed as fast as possible. In both cases you may need to adapt the data model to fit your queries better. In the case you go for Athena you'd also proabably need to change your file format to Parquet or Avro and review your partition strategy depending on your most frequent type of query. If you choose Redshift you'll need to ingest the data from your files into it and maybe carry out some tuning tasks for performance gain.

I'll recommend Redshift for now since it can address a wider range of use cases, but we could give you better advice if you described your use case in depth.

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Alexis Blandin
Recommends
on
Amazon AthenaAmazon Athena

It depend of the nature of your data (structured or not?) and of course your queries (ad-hoc or predictible?). For example you can look at partitioning and columnar format to maximize MPP capabilities for both Athena and Redshift

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Recommends

you can change your PSV fomat data to parquet file format with AWS GLUE and then your query performance will be improved

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Vinay Mehta
Needs advice
on
CassandraCassandra
and
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

The problem I have is - we need to process & change(update/insert) 55M Data every 2 min and this updated data to be available for Rest API for Filtering / Selection. Response time for Rest API should be less than 1 sec.

The most important factors for me are processing and storing time of 2 min. There need to be 2 views of Data One is for Selection & 2. Changed data.

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Replies (4)
Recommends
on
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

Scylla can handle 1M/s events with a simple data model quite easily. The api to query is CQL, we have REST api but that's for control/monitoring

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Alex Peake
Recommends
on
CassandraCassandra

Cassandra is quite capable of the task, in a highly available way, given appropriate scaling of the system. Remember that updates are only inserts, and that efficient retrieval is only by key (which can be a complex key). Talking of keys, make sure that the keys are well distributed.

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Recommends
on
ScyllaDBScyllaDB

By 55M do you mean 55 million entity changes per 2 minutes? It is relatively high, means almost 460k per second. If I had to choose between Scylla or Cassandra, I would opt for Scylla as it is promising better performance for simple operations. However, maybe it would be worth to consider yet another alternative technology. Take into consideration required consistency, reliability and high availability and you may realize that there are more suitable once. Rest API should not be the main driver, because you can always develop the API yourself, if not supported by given technology.

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Pankaj Soni
Chief Technical Officer at Software Joint · | 2 upvotes · 147.7K views
Recommends
on
CassandraCassandra

i love syclla for pet projects however it's license which is based on server model is an issue. thus i recommend cassandra

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Pros of Amazon Athena
Pros of Cassandra
  • 16
    Use SQL to analyze CSV files
  • 8
    Glue crawlers gives easy Data catalogue
  • 7
    Cheap
  • 6
    Query all my data without running servers 24x7
  • 4
    No data base servers yay
  • 3
    Easy integration with QuickSight
  • 2
    Query and analyse CSV,parquet,json files in sql
  • 2
    Also glue and athena use same data catalog
  • 1
    No configuration required
  • 0
    Ad hoc checks on data made easy
  • 119
    Distributed
  • 98
    High performance
  • 81
    High availability
  • 74
    Easy scalability
  • 53
    Replication
  • 26
    Reliable
  • 26
    Multi datacenter deployments
  • 10
    Schema optional
  • 9
    OLTP
  • 8
    Open source
  • 2
    Workload separation (via MDC)
  • 1
    Fast

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Cons of Amazon Athena
Cons of Cassandra
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 3
      Reliability of replication
    • 1
      Size
    • 1
      Updates

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Amazon Athena?

    Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

    What is Cassandra?

    Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

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    Blog Posts

    Aug 28 2019 at 3:10AM

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    What are some alternatives to Amazon Athena and Cassandra?
    Presto
    Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data
    Amazon Redshift Spectrum
    With Redshift Spectrum, you can extend the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond data stored on local disks in your data warehouse to query vast amounts of unstructured data in your Amazon S3 “data lake” -- without having to load or transform any data.
    Amazon Redshift
    It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
    Spectrum
    The community platform for the future.
    Amazon Quicksight
    Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data.
    See all alternatives