Posted On: Nov 5, 2021

Amazon Athena now displays the computational cost of your queries alongside their execution plans. With the release of the EXPLAIN ANALYZE statement, Athena can now execute your specified query and return a detailed breakdown of its execution plan along with the CPU usage of each stage and the number of rows processed.

In addition to understanding a query’s execution plan, you can now see the time spent within each operator to better assess the performance profiles of query clauses and their chosen ordering. With row input and output counts, you can also validate the impact of query predicates, especially over large datasets. Administrators will also find the scanned data counts useful in planning the financial impact of their users’ workloads and identifying queries that could benefit from further optimization or that should be governed to control costs using Athena’s data usage controls.

The EXPLAIN ANALYZE statement executes your queries to produce its results, so you will incur charges for use. To learn more, see Amazon Athena pricing. For more information on using execution plans and their detailed data, see Using Explain Plan in Athena and Understanding Athena Explain Plan Results.