Why does a single AWS Athena query get stuck in QUEUED state before being executed?

One of the drawbacks of AWS Athena is the fact that as a user, you don’t have control over query performance and predictability. One specific issue that comes up quite a bit for Athena users is single queries getting stuck in a QUEUED state before being executed. This happens because of Athena’s serverless nature in combination with its multi-tenant service – you are essentially competing for resources when you run a query.

Many users will get the message “Query waiting in queue” somewhat randomly. For this reason, it’s recommended to not use Athena for user-facing requests because of its unpredictability, and generally many users have decided they can’t rely on Athena at all based on this issue. If you can’t predict demand and manage multi-tenancy, it’s not ideal for ad-hoc analytics (which is a core use case for PrestoDB).

For users who still want to leverage PrestoDB for ad-hoc analytics and data lake analytics, Ahana Cloud is a solution that allows you to run Presto transparently as a managed service. You won’t run into the issues around unpredictability and queries getting stuck. There’s a 14 day free trial if you’re interested in checking it out.

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.