Amazon Athena vs. PostgreSQL

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Athena
Score 8.4 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
PostgreSQL
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
PostgreSQL (alternately Postgres) is a free and open source object-relational database system boasting over 30 years of active development, reliability, feature robustness, and performance. It supports SQL and is designed to support various workloads flexibly.N/A
Pricing
Amazon AthenaPostgreSQL
Editions & Modules
Price per Query
$5.00
per TB of Data Scanned
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon AthenaPostgreSQL
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon AthenaPostgreSQL
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon AthenaPostgreSQL
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
8.5
3 Ratings
3% below category average
PostgreSQL
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability8.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups7.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions9.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics8.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment9.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon AthenaPostgreSQL
Small Businesses
SingleStore
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Score 9.8 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SingleStore
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Score 9.8 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SingleStore
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Score 9.8 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon AthenaPostgreSQL
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(3 ratings)
8.7
(53 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(6 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(7 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon AthenaPostgreSQL
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
If you are looking to take a lot of the traditional "database administration" work off someone's plate, going with Amazon Athena certainly has "no code" options to optimize lots of database tasks. I would say this option is less appropriate if you have other Microsoft things at play, such as Power BI.
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
PostgreSQL, unlike other databases, is user-friendly and uses an open-source database. Ideal for relational databases, they can be accessed when speed and efficiency are required. It enables high-availability and disaster recovery replication from instance to instance. PostgreSQL can store data in a JSON format, including hashes, keys, and values. Multi-platform compatibility is also a big selling point. We could, however, use all the DBMS’s cores. While it works well in fast environments, it can be problematic in slower ones or cause multiple master replication.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Nested Schemas like JSON data structure
  • Ability to adapt the data model to fit your queries better
  • Performance Improvement
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  • The stability it offers, its speed of response and its resource management is excellent even in complex database environments and with low-resource machines.
  • The large amount of resources it has in addition to the many own and third-party tools that are compatible that make productivity greatly increase.
  • The adaptability in various environments, whether distributed or not, [is a] complete set of configuration options which allows to greatly customize the work configuration according to the needs that are required.
  • The excellent handling of referential and transactional integrity, its internal security scheme, the ease with which we can create backups are some of the strengths that can be mentioned.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Query manager can incoperate GUI based query designer
  • Auto-completion engine sometimes overwrite the query
  • Time range selection should be implicit
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  • The query syntax for JSON fields is unwieldy when you start getting into complex queries with many joins.
  • I wish there was a distinction (a flag) you could set for automated scripts vs working in the psql CLI, which would provide an 'Are you sure you want to do X?' type prompt if your query is likely to affect more than a certain number of rows. Especially on updates/deletes. Setting the flag in the headless(scripted) flow would disable the prompt.
  • Better documentation around JSON and Array aggregation, with more examples of how the data is transformed.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
As a needed software for day to day development activities
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Usability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
Postgresql is the best tool out there for relational data so I have to give it a high rating when it comes to analytics, data availability and consistency, so on and so forth. SQL is also a relatively consistent language so when it comes to building new tables and loading data in from the OLTP database, there are enough tools where we can perform ETL on a scalable basis.
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Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
PostgreSQL's availability is top notch. Apart from connection time-out for an idle user, the database is super reliable.
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Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
The data queries are relatively quick for a small to medium sized table. With complex joins, and a wide and deep table however, the performance of the query has room for improvement.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
There are several companies that you can contract for technical support, like EnterpriseDB or Percona, both first level in expertise and commitment to the software.
But we do not have contracts with them, we have done all the way from googling to forums, and never have a problem that we cannot resolve or pass around. And for dozens of projects and more than 15 years now.
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Online Training
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
The online training is request based. Had there been recorded videos available online for potential users to benefit from, I could have rated it higher. The online documentation however is very helpful. The online documentation PDF is downloadable and allows users to pace their own learning. With examples and code snippets, the documentation is great starting point.
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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
The online documentation of the PostgreSQL product is elaborate and takes users step by step.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
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.
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
Postgres stacks up just [fine] along the other big players in the RDBMS world. It's very popular for a reason. It's very close to MySQL in terms of cost and features - I'd pick either solution and be just as happy. Compared to Oracle it is a MUCH cheaper solution that is just as usable.
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Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
The DB is reliable, scalable, easy to use and resolves most DB needs
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Easy to query terabytes of data with faster response
  • Pricing model is also cheap
  • No indexing and partitioning
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  • The user-role system has saved us tons of time and thus money. As I mentioned in the "Use Case" section, Postgres is not only used by engineering but also finance to measure how much to charge customers and customer support to debug customer issues. Sure, it's not easy for non-technical employees to psql in and view raw tables, but it has saved engineering hundreds of man-hours that would have had to be spent on building equivalent tools to serve finance or customer support.
  • It provides incredibly trustworthy storage for wherever customer data dumped in. In our 6 years of Postgres existence, we have not lost a byte of customer data due to Postgres messing up a transaction or during the multiple times the hard-drives failed (thanks to ACID compliance!).
  • This is less significant, but Postgres is also quite easy to manage (unless you are going above and beyond to squeeze out every last bit of performance). There's not much to configure, and the out of the box settings are quite sane. That has saved us engineers lots of time that would have gone into Postgres administration.
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