Firebolt vs Athena

Overcome Athena Limitations with Firebolt

Athena is a serverless query engine based on open source Presto. It addresses ad-hoc analytics and exploratory workloads. However, slow response times and concurrency limitations can be a challenge, especially as your data volume grows.Firebolt was designed for high concurrency, low latency analytics from the ground up. Point Firebolt at your data in S3, and you’ll quickly be up and running with sub-second analytics at TB++ scale for your most challenging workloads.

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Experience 60 X Performance Boost

Appsflyer couldn’t get the performance or the scalability they needed from Amazon Athena, so they moved to Firebolt. Firebolt gave them the sub-second query performance they needed, at 5x lower costs compared to the alternatives.

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Queries

Athena

Firebolt

Performance boost

Boost

120 sec

36 sec

11 sec

104 sec

1.8 sec

1.1 sec

0.3 sec

1.4 sec

x67

x33

x37

x74

Filter by App_id and media

26 sec

0.5 sec

x52

Filter just by App_id

Count distinct on all data

73 sec

0.4 sec

x183

117 sec

2.1 sec

x56

Architecture

Decoupled Compute and Storage

Performance

Pricing Model

Indexes

Materialized Views

Compare Athena to Firebolt

Architecture

Athena is a serverless query engine built on open source Presto, primarily for ad-hoc query use cases. Athena queries data-in-place in S3 or in other data stores. Needs external tools for data storage optimization.

Firebolt is a columnar Data Warehouse architected from the ground up for low-latency analytics workloads at TB++ scale with built-in storage optimization. No external tools or optimizations needed.

Decoupled Compute and Storage

Athena leverages multi-tenant compute pool to run user queries against external storage. Does not provide options to control or optimize compute or storage.

Decoupled compute and storage is a key design element in Firebolt, allowing independent scaling of compute and storage. Provides control and visibility of resources for easy, cost effective scaling and workload isolation.

Performance

Athena provides serverless pools for processing large volumes of data efficiently. However, it does not support sub-second latency or high concurrency use cases.

Firebolt offers sub-second latency by leveraging optimized file format along with specialized indexes. Firebolt engines address high concurrency use cases.

Pricing Model

Athena charges for amount of data scanned. This cost model introduces unpredictability as data and query volumes grow. Additional costs of processing and preparing data for Athena querying need to be factored.

Firebolt provides transparent, consumption based pricing. Granular compute and performance optimized object storage provide clear visibility into cost of the solution.

Indexes

Athena supports data pruning through partitions, however, it does not have specialized indexes to address fine grained pruning for fast access.

Firebolt’s zero maintenance indexes are storage efficient and provide rapid data access without the management overhead.

Materialized Views

Athena currently does not support materialized views. Materialization of data or aggregations need to be completed external to Athena.

Firebolt’s aggregating indexes are defined once, incrementally auto-synced at ingest and data can be queried at index speed immediately. No query rewrites needed.

Firebolt vs Athena

Overcome Athena Limitations with Firebolt

Experience 60 X Performance Boost

Queries

Athena

Firebolt

Performance boost

Boost

x67

x33

x37

x74

x52

x183

x56

Architecture

Decoupled Compute and Storage

Performance

Pricing Model

Indexes

Materialized Views

Compare Athena to Firebolt

Architecture

Decoupled Compute and Storage

Performance

Pricing Model

Indexes

Materialized Views

The Firebolt Advantage

Performance

SaaS

Predictable pricing

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