News

Looker Supports Amazon Athena for Data Lake Analytics

• By David Ramel
• 01/24/2017

Looker Data Sciences Inc. has developed a connector that lets users of its data platform work with the Amazon Athena managed service from Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS).

The namesake Looker offering is described as a complete data platform that can be embedded in third-party applications such as Salesforce.com. Looker can also be used to create custom Web apps for enterprise products, while offering RESTful API access to provide functionality such as data visualization in messaging tools such as Slack, its parent company says. Now that third-party reach has been extended to include Athena.

Amazon Athena is a relatively new -- announced last November -- serverless, interactive query service that lets developers and other users analyze data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using standard SQL queries. Amazon S3 provides object storage with a simple Web service interface. It's commonly used in Big Data analytics initiatives as an enterprise data lake that can store all of a company's data -- structured, unstructured and semi-structured -- in one place, allowing for comprehensive queries and analytics.

"Looker took an early bet on SQL as the lingua franca for data analysis," the company said in a blog post yesterday. "We developed a product that directly leverages the underlying power and functionality of SQL dialects, and already has full support for the ecosystem of Amazon products including RDS, Redshift, and EMR via Spark SQL, Hive and Presto. Now, either in conjunction with these engines or separately, you can leverage Looker on Athena to make data in S3 available across your organization. Looker doesn't move your data from S3, it directly leverages the power of Athena to query the data where it lives."

In a news release, Looker said the new Athena support provides benefits such as:

• World-class speed in retrieving queries.
• The delivery of advanced analytics on all data stored in S3 to an entire organization.
• The ability to transform an Amazon S3 data lake into an easy-to-explore and actionable data platform.

"Amazon Athena makes it easy for companies to query all the data they're storing in Amazon S3 using standard SQL in a pay-per-query model, without having to migrate it to a dedicated warehouse with no infrastructure to manage and no data loading required," said AWS exec Rahul Pathak. "Looker builds on that capability by allowing companies to define their data and provide a powerful interface for everyone, even users with no SQL experience, to query and visualize their data."

Looker said its new connection to Amazon Athena is available immediately, and Athena support will be built into the next edition of its data platform.