athena

DuckLake spec 1 shipped on 13 April 2026 and keeps lake metadata in a SQL database. DuckDB's architecture note puts Iceberg planning at about 100 ms per sequential S3 GET, roughly half a second before a query starts. On AWS, stay on S3 Tables when Athena, Glue, or Redshift must read the table.

For an enterprise lake (~38 TB Iceberg, 8.4k small files), S3 Tables managed compaction cut Athena scan spend −35% — compaction OPEX −90% vs pre–July 2025 pricing on the same workload.

CUR 2.0 (generally available 2024, default for new exports in 2025) adds line-item resource IDs and Savings Plan attribution columns Athena needs for serious chargeback. A standard FinOps query pack answers top-10 services, untagged spend, and SP coverage in under 60 seconds.

Glue ETL + Athena SQL without servers — still the default lake path. July 2026: Glue 5.x jobs, Parquet partitions, ~$0.44/DPU-hour + $5/TB scan math, pipeline checklist.