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RADE™ Querying & Optimizing the Data Lake with Amazon Athena
Serverless Analytics, Cost Optimization & ELT Patterns for Data Engineers
Course Summary
RADE™ Querying & Optimizing the Data Lake with Amazon Athena
Serverless Analytics, Cost Optimization & ELT Patterns for Data Engineers
Amazon Athena is often treated as a “simple SQL tool.”
In reality, it is a powerful, serverless analytics engine that sits at the heart of modern data lake and lakehouse architectures.
This short, focused course teaches how Data Engineers actually use Athena in production — to query large-scale data in S3, optimize performance, control costs, and implement ELT-style transformations without managing any infrastructure.
You’ll go beyond writing SQL and learn how Athena works under the hood, how pricing really behaves, and how to design data layouts that are fast, cheap, and scalable.
This course is part of the RADE Diamond Membership – Applied Data Engineering Mastery Program and contributes to the Lakehouse Mastery track.
What You’ll Learn
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How Athena external tables work (metadata vs S3 data)
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What serverless really means in Athena (Trino-based execution)
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Why dropping a table never deletes S3 data (interview favorite)
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How to optimize query performance using table statistics
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Cost optimization strategies:
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Parquet vs CSV
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Partitioning strategies
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Snappy compression
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Query result reuse (caching)
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How to use CTAS (Create Table As Select) for ELT
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Incremental loads using INSERT INTO
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When plain Parquet works — and when it breaks
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Why Apache Iceberg is required for UPDATE / DELETE use cases
Who This Course Is For
✔ Data Engineers working with S3-based analytics
✔ Engineers using Athena for ad-hoc queries or dashboards
✔ Professionals preparing for Athena-heavy interviews
Outcome
By the end of this short course, you will be able to:
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Confidently design Athena-based analytics on S3
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Reduce Athena costs by 70–90% using proven patterns
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Implement ELT transformations using CTAS
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Explain Athena architecture clearly in interviews
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Know when to move from plain Parquet to Lakehouse (Iceberg)
Note (Important)
This is a focused, high-leverage course, not a full Athena encyclopedia.
It is designed to:
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Deliver fast ROI
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Unlock immediate production confidence
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Prepare learners for the next Lakehouse course (Iceberg)
Course Curriculum
Sachin Chandrashekhar
