Amazon Athena vs. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Athena
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run. You can use Athena to process logs, perform ad-hoc analysis, and run…
$5
per TB of Data Scanned
Amazon RDS
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) from Amazon Web Services.N/A
Pricing
Amazon AthenaAmazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Editions & Modules
Price per Query
$5.00
per TB of Data Scanned
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
$0.24 ($0.48)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MariaDB
$0.25 ($0.50)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MySQL
$0.29 ($0.58)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for Oracle
$0.482 ($0.964)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for SQL Server
$1.02 ($1.52)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon AthenaAmazon RDS
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon AthenaAmazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Features
Amazon AthenaAmazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
8.6
Ratings
1% below category average
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon AthenaAmazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 7.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
InterSystems IRIS
InterSystems IRIS
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
SAP IQ
SAP IQ
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon AthenaAmazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon AthenaAmazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for analyzing huge amounts of data by just querying on Amazon Athena. Amazon Athena is also best to integrate with Amazon Quickight for visualization and reporting of data. Easy to work with CSV, JSON, and columnar data formats like Parquet, and ORC. Less appropriate to work with AVRO data format and also stored procedures are not supported in Amazon Athena. The size of a single row is also limited to 32 MB.
Read full review
If your application needs a relational data store and uses other AWS services, AWS RDS is a no-brainer. It offers all the traditional database features, makes it a snap to set up, creates cross-region replication, has advanced security, built-in monitoring, and much more at a very good price. You can also set up streaming to a data lake using various other AWS services on your RDS.
Read full review
Pros
  • Load Balance traffic analysis
  • Big data report generation
  • Micro services pattern query analysis
Read full review
  • Automated Database Management: We use it for streamlining routine tasks like software patching and database backups.
  • Scalability on Demand: we use it to handle traffic spikes, scaling both vertically and horizontally.
  • Database Engine Compatibility: It works amazingly with multiple database engines used by different departments within our organization including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle.
  • Monitoring: It covers our extensive monitoring and logging, and also has great compatibility with Amazon CloudWatch
Read full review
Cons
  • Every dialect of SQL has some missing functions. I wish there was automated GROUP BY options here.
  • There are connection problems back to Power BI occasionally.
  • If you don't watch certain queries, it's possible that it takes a long time to run and charges you a lot of money.
Read full review
  • It is a little difficult to configure and connect to an RDS instance. The integration with ECS can be made more seamless.
  • Exploring features within RDS is not very easy and intuitive. Either a human friendly documentation should be added or the User Interface be made intuitive so that people can explore and find features on their own.
  • There should be tools to analyze cost and minimize it according to the usage.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We do renew our use of Amazon Relational Database Service. We don't have any problems faced with RDS in place. RDS has taken away lot of overhead of hosting database, managing the database and keeping a team just to manage database. Even the backup, security and recovery another overhead that has been taken away by RDS. So, we will keep on using RDS.
Read full review
Usability
Easy to use. Scalable. Gets the job of data warehousing setup done. Using the datalake on S3 has become super convenient.
Read full review
I've been using AWS Relational Database Services in several projects in different environments and from the AWS products, maybe this one together to EC2 are my favourite. They deliver what they promise. Reliable, fast, easy and with a fair price (in comparison to commercial products which have obscure license agreements).
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.
Read full review
Online Training
No answers on this topic
the online training & digital content available on the web from AWS was having sufficient information to deploy and run the service
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon Athena, a product from Amazon, competes with offerings from Google and Microsoft. Overall, I think your database choice depends on some of the other applications you are running at your company. For example, if you are using Microsoft Power BI for reporting needs, you might want to consider going the Azure route.
Read full review
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) stands out among similar products due to its seamless integration with other AWS services, automated backups, and multi-AZ deployments for high availability. Its support for various database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, provides flexibility. Additionally, RDS offers managed security features, including encryption and IAM integration, enhancing data protection. The pay-as-you-go pricing model makes it cost-effective. Overall, Amazon RDS excels in ease of use, scalability, and a comprehensive feature set, making it a top choice for organizations seeking a reliable and scalable managed relational database service in the cloud.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • It's easy to store and query data on S3. Multiple teams can query the same data to generate their reports. It removes the need for a full-fledged data warehouse for a startup. Saves costs.
  • Improved team efficiency on monitoring user activities by easy logging and reporting.
  • As the dataset gets heavier on S3, one needs to understand partitioning and that leads to the requirement of expertise.
Read full review
  • The overall cost increases, but we spect this and we can mitigate other risks.
  • Is easy to work from the cloud. Is reliable, but we keep our local solution as well where RDS works quite good.
  • RDS allow us to focurs on owr objetives instead of the other matters regarding databases.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Amazon RDS Screenshots

Screenshot of A look inside the RDS console.