What are the AWS Glue partition limits and does it apply to AWS Athena?

Typically you’ll use AWS Glue to create the data sources and tables that Athena will query. You could also create your tables using Athena and then use the tables in AWS Glue. Today the limit for AWS Glue partitions is 10M while Athena’s partition limit is 20K partitions per table. So if you’re using AWS Glue you get more partitions if you’re using the AWS Glue catalog with your Athena deployment. 

When it comes to using Amazon Athena, there are a lot of other limits besides partitions including query, concurrent query, and database limits. Many times AWS Athena users find these limits to hinder SLAs and other business-critical applications. As a result, they’re looking for alternatives to AWS Athena and have found that Ahana Cloud’s Presto managed service can address those issues.

Ahana Cloud is a Presto managed service that gives users the power of Presto, similar to AWS Athena, but without the limitations around queries, performance, and control. With Ahana you get the full control of your Presto deployment on AWS, so you can scale as you need without having to worry about partition or query limits.

Learn more about how Ahana Cloud compares to AWS Athena.

Ready to get started? Sign up try out Ahana Cloud for free – if you’re an AWS Athena user, it’s really easy to move from Athena to Ahana Cloud and requires not change in your existing architecture.

You can also check out the case study from ad tech company Carbon on why they moved from AWS Athena to Ahana Cloud for better query performance and more control over their deployment.