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DestinationsAthenaOverview

AWS Athena

Source + Destination — Vendo connects to AWS Athena to query your S3-backed data lake directly. Serverless, pay-per-query, and no infrastructure to manage. No VPC or IP whitelisting needed.

Key Benefits

  • Zero-Copy Access — Query your data lake tables directly. Data never leaves S3.
  • No Infrastructure — Athena is serverless. No clusters to manage or scale.
  • No IP Whitelisting — Athena is accessed via the AWS API, not a network endpoint.
  • Pay Per Query — No idle compute costs. You pay only for data scanned.

How It Works

Vendo connects via the AWS Athena API. Queries are submitted asynchronously — Athena executes them against your S3 data and writes results to a designated S3 output location. Vendo retrieves the results and processes them in memory.

No data is stored by Vendo. Query results in the S3 output bucket are managed by your AWS account.

Authentication

MethodDescription
IAM CredentialsAWS access key ID + secret access key with Athena and S3 permissions

What You Need

  • An AWS account with Athena enabled
  • An S3 bucket for query results (Athena requires an output location)
  • A Glue Data Catalog database with tables defined
  • AWS IAM credentials with Athena and S3 permissions

Platform Details

SettingValue
Connection MethodAWS Athena API
Query ExecutionAsync (start + poll + get results)
AuthenticationAWS IAM credentials
Data StorageNone — zero-copy (results in your S3 bucket)
SQL DialectPresto/Trino
VPC/FirewallNot required

What to Expect After Setup

  1. Connection Verified — Vendo tests connectivity by running a simple query
  2. Schema Browser — Browse databases and tables from your Glue Data Catalog
  3. Query Ready — Run SQL queries, build models, and create audiences
  4. No Sync Needed — Queries execute directly against your data lake
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