Limitations

Athena uses an approach known as schema-on-read, which means a schema is projected on to your data at the time that you execute a query. This eliminates the need for data loading or transformation. Athena does not modify your data in Amazon S3, but instead uses Apache Hive to define tables and create databases, which are essentially a logical namespace of tables.

When you drop a table in Athena, only the table metadata is removed; the data remains in Amazon S3.

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