Athena is presto/trino rebranded. But you dont really pay for CPU and it can basically scale to 100 CPUs for free.
It is not really a database but an SQL interface for map/reduce jobs. But it can handle any size of data and is pretty efficient when it is partitioned.
Ah yes then I am very familiar with Athena- like tools. At my old job I used pyspark and I must say I did enjoy how easy it was to make custom python UDFs in combination with SQL so I miss that in a pure SQL environment. But for a lot of applications SQL gets the job done.
Yeah this is why i am hoping that EMR serverless would be the next step.
You get the freedom of not having to set up the resources. It is cheap because you are basically eating the breadcrumbs of available cpu capacity "oh i have 10 idle cpus here in Italy to do one part of you map job" etc.
But you are not locked in to SQL. (Athena has UDFs but they are not very user friendly).
It is not really a database but an SQL interface for map/reduce jobs. But it can handle any size of data and is pretty efficient when it is partitioned.
And it has zero setup cost.